What's The Real Skinny On The Commercial Herring Fishery?

[wildmanyeah]

No, we don't need herring hatcheries, we just need to stop killing them.
This herring roe fishery reminds me of how we are managing chum stocks ... **** poorly.

It was more a joke based on the fact that many think salmon hatcheries are our savior.

 

[Whitebuck]

Dave is bang on....exporting roe for foreign buyers over conservation of stocks needs to stop..
Oh and shoot the seals too lol

 

[Aces]

JAPAN!

Well their roe went there, the majority of them ended up at West Coast Reduction

 

[fish4all]

That's interesting. A quick search found me this. I have heard of this magazine. Not DFO stats but I would think they are knowledgeable?
https://www.nationalfisherman.com/alaska/herring-weight-drives-busy-japanese-market/

Was that $2800/ton for roe from herring? roe from kelp? Or herring sold to make fish food pellets (which is against the law in my opinion)?

Roe herring.

 

[Charlie415]

Roe herring.

Where can I find this information? Is SOG herring that more valuable than Alaska? Would love to see the documentation to go with your assessments. Maybe the article I referred to is an average price or lowest price for the dregs? I am not discounting your data, just looking to put all the data in context to compare. Can you educate me as to what percentage of the herring harvested went to roe?

 

[fish4all]

Where can I find this information? Is SOG herring that more valuable than Alaska? Would love to see the documentation to go with your assessments. Maybe the article I referred to is an average price or lowest price for the dregs? I am not discounting your data, just looking to put all the data in context to compare. Can you educate me as to what percentage of the herring harvested went to roe?

Yes SOG roe is the most valuable based on colour and size. The numbers I quoted came off our settlement sheet from the company. The document put out by the hornby group talks about vessel prices(and they are off a bit) not gross value. To the best of my knowledge it is roughly 20% food herring and 80% roe herring.

 

[mbowers]

I've heard lots of very opposing opinions on this in the past couple days. Without being assholes to each other can anyone offer their perspective? Is it well managed? Is it detrimental? Please use facts and science, what your uncle told you doesn't count. And if you're in some way massively biased maybe stay out of it as well lol.

Ya there seems to be a lot of misleading information out there by groups with political agendas. Proposed roe quota (19.5k t out of 190k t stock) seems to be about 10% of BC stock. Max sustainable yield for herring is around 50% so I'm comfortable at 10%. Those numbers came from the DFO integrated plan for herring.



Interesting read in link on managing forage fish. Wonder if the same applies to chinook as forage fish.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165783617300176

Highlights


•
Predator rate of increase is uncorrelated with forage fish abundance.

•
Forage species are affected much more by environmental conditions than by fishing.

•
Previous analysis of forage fish impacts on predators ignored natural variability.

•
Spatial distribution of forage species may be more important than their abundance.

•
Predators often take small forage fish that are unaffected by fishing.

 

[wildmanyeah]

Part of the Reason why SOG has a productive herring population. Some Fishermen in the SOG might know it as the brown crap that sticks to your line. Diatom Bloom! The Fraser river dumps out thousands of tonnes of silica in the spring feeding these guys like crazy! Probably some expects on here like @Bugs who can expand on this but thats my limited understanding.

https://salishsea.eos.ubc.ca/bloomcast/

"The timing of the spring phytoplankton bloom in the Strait of Georgia is highly variable, ranging from late February to mid-April. Changes in the timing have been related to the success of herring larval recruitment [1] and studies in a nearby fjord suggest it may affect the zooplankton species composition [2]. In this well stratified, mid-latitude system, the timing is controlled by the light availability to the phytoplankton which is in turn controlled by the incoming light (cloud fraction decreases this) and by the depth over which the phytoplankton are mixed (wind increases this). The role of freshwater is more nuanced; more river outflow both:

1. stabilizes the water column which decreases the depth over which the phytoplankton are mixed, increasing their growth rate, and
2. increases the advection loss of phytoplankton."