By GARRET JAROS/YachatsNews
NEWPORT — One of nature’s epic shows visited Newport this past week as millions of Pacific herring made their annual stop in Yaquina Bay to spawn.
The highly anticipated event attracts photographers and bait fisherman and sets off a wildlife frenzy that feasts on the banquet of fish and their billions of eggs.
“It’s amazing,” said wildlife photographer Roy Lowe of Waldport. “We wait for this all year. It is like a movie you would watch in a theater and it’s happening right in our back yard. It is just so spectacular.”
The water churned with sea lions and harbor seals as they thrashed through the tightly packed schools of herring along Yaquina’s south jetty Thursday. Seagulls battled in the skies to steal from each other the herring they plucked from the water’s surface and from the rocks along the shoreline where the fish sought shelter from the onslaught.
“They will be flipping around on the rocks until the next little wave comes and washes them back,” Lowe said. “It all provides for some spectacular opportunities for photography.”
Lowe has been closely monitoring the herring’s annual returns since retiring from managing national wildlife refuges along the Oregon coast for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“I have a little more time on my hands now so I’ve been annually charting the spawn and it’s gotten a little later over the years,” Lowe said. “I read back in a paper from 1970 where the first spawn was on Feb. 5. And we haven’t had anything close to that in recent times. We’ve had some mid-February to late February but the last three years it’s been in March.”
It is always a bit difficult to know when the spawn will occur, but a cadre of retirees and photographers watch the bay diligently beginning in mid-February.
“What we look for before the spawn happens is herds of sea lions chasing the fish up and down the bay – and they’ll be way up past river bend, way up the bay,” Lowe said. “And when we see that we know the fish are in the bay and will probably within a week there’ll be a spawn.”
This year’s spawn began Thursday.
Another photographer called Lowe that morning to say there was a lot of activity and that the sea lions were going crazy.
“He didn’t say anything about the spawn and I said ‘Well, if it really gets rolling let me know,’” Lowe said. “And about an hour later he called me and said ‘It’s on’ so I raced up there and arrived about 9 a.m. and didn’t leave until 5:15. I took a little over 2,000 photos.”
Once a commercial fishery
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s fishery manager Troy Buell confirmed the herring’s arrival was a little late this year, but said the actual time they spawned is consistent with what they’ve seen recently.
“Often times they’ll come into the bay and be here for a few weeks or even a few months before they spawn,” Buell said. “And usually once the females deposit their eggs and the males release their milt in the water, the water will look white because there is so much milt. Once that happens, they usually don’t stick around for more than a few days.”
But this year, nobody saw much sign of them before the spawn.
“They were here maybe four or five days and then really here for like a day or two before they spawned,” Buell said.
An adult herring ranges in size from eight to 15 inches. Their average lifespan is between seven and nine years during which time they spawn three to five times. They range the entire Pacific coastline from Baja to Alaska and across the north Pacific to Japan. A single female will lay about 20,000 eggs, which only a couple will survive to adulthood.
“Another place this happens pretty reliably is Coos Bay,” Buell said. “Sometimes they will have two spawning events. But it’s been a while since we’ve seen that in Yaquina Bay. But that did happen in Coos Bay this year. They spawned once in mid-February and then again at the same time it happened here.”
Overall herring population numbers are unknown and vary quite a bit year to year. It’s also not certain what percentage return to bays each year versus spawning in the ocean. Also unclear is why they risk the heavy predation in the bays.
“Last year there was a big milt discoloration off the water of Depoe Bay that you could see from shore,” Buell said. “And crabbers will tell you of finding herring eggs on their crab lines.”
Wildlife managers use the “scientific version of a fish finder” to estimate the biomass or overall tonnage to determine the numbers that enter the bay and then set a harvest rate of 20 percent for commercial fishing in Yaquina Bay.
“That said, that fishery rarely happens,” Buell said. “It started back in the ’80s as a roe fishery. They were targeting the roe right before they spawned. They would remove what is called the roe sack — it was an expensive food item in Japan for a long time. It was popular to put in special gift boxes.”
That market is not so lucrative these days and is pretty much satisfied by larger fisheries in British Columbia and Alaska. So the commercial fishery the last 10 years has mainly been for supplying bait to fishermen and bait shops, which is also what draws most of the recreational fisherman to the Yaquina spawn.
Fishermen will sometimes pull in as many as four or five herring at a time, often snagging some of them because the water is so thick with fish, Buell said. The recreational limit is 25 pounds a day per person. Some people do pickle or smoke herring to eat, which Buell said taste very fishy — like 10 sardines packed into one.
Quieter on Monday
The spawn along the shallows of Yaquina Bay’s south jetty was finished by Monday, leaving behind a few photographers and videographer Howard Shippey to focus on flocks of surf scoters and other diving ducks as well as gulls feasting on herring eggs.
“These are ideal spawning spots for them, behind the little finger jetties that stick out,” Shippey said. “There are just zillions and zillions of eggs in here. And it just provides a bounty, a smorgasbord for so many different critters. Just to give you an idea of how thick it is with millions of fish releasing their eggs and then the males releasing their (milt), this whole section of water in here was bluer than the sky.”
Shippey also recorded a surfacing harbor seal covered with eggs, which float around until they find something stable to stick too, oftentimes kelp or eelgrass.
“The surf scoters move in unison as they go after the eggs, just like in the air when birds move together in what’s called murmuration,” Shippey said. “They are so in tune with the birds to the left and the right of them. How do they figure out who the leader is? Who decides? How do they decide? There’s a lot of mystery that goes on around here. It is fascinating to watch.”
Both Shippey and Lowe expressed concern about not over-fishing for herring, which are a forage fish crucial to the marine and estuary ecosystems because they feed so many things along the food chain.
“So it’s really important to the ecosystem and in many locations they’ve been overfished because people say ‘Oh, it’s a bounty and we can harvest the heck out of it,’ ” Lowe said. “San Francisco had a huge run in the past and they got way over-harvested.”
In nature there is always enough so long as humans do not overly impact it, Shippey said, taking “to the edge of what’s necessary for the herring’s survival, which then leaves them susceptible to natural (catastrophes).
“There have been years where the herring runs that come back are really lackluster,” Shippey said Monday. “This one here is what I would call about middle of the road.”
- Garret Jaros covers the communities of Yachats, Waldport, south Lincoln County and natural resources issues for YachatsNews and can be reached at GJaros@YachatsNews.com
Comment Policy