Saving Seafood

Martha’s Vineyard herring stocks show alarming decline

November 30, 2017 — Herring Creek is a small stream that plays a mighty role in the Martha’s Vineyard ecosystem. It’s the one waterway that connects Menemsha Pond and Squibnocket Pond, and the one place on the Island where blueback herring and alewives — also known as river herring — come home to reproduce.

River herring are anadromous fish and live most of their lives, three to five years, in the ocean. When it’s time to breed, they return to the exact river or pond where they were born.

Twenty years ago, the herring run at Herring Creek was described as “one of the largest on the East Coast, with up to 1.5 million fish making their way through the creek,” according to David H. Killoy, then chief of permits and enforcement for the Army Corps of Engineers.

Read the full story at the Martha’s Vineyard Times

 

Aquinnah Herring Cam Offers Fish’s Eye View of Underwater Action

April 28, 2016 — Since installing the Island’s first underwater herring cam in March, scientists for the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), have had a fish’s-eye view of herring, otters, cormorants and other species making their way through a historic herring run in Aquinnah.

On a chilly afternoon this week, Bret Stearns, director of the tribe’s natural resources department, along with lab manager Andrew Jacobs, stood at the top of a steep bank looking down at a simple fish weir and monitoring station between Menemsha and Squibnocket ponds. Small metal poles formed a V-shaped fence, forcing anything larger than a minnow into a small chamber where an underwater camera is running 24 hours a day. Occasionally a cormorant would splash to the surface on the other side and paddle its way upstream, under a culvert and into Squibnocket Pond.

A long-running moratorium on herring fishing in the state applies to both commercial and recreational use, but Native American tribes are allowed to harvest the fish for sustenance. The natural resources department has long sought a better system to monitor the population and ensure that the fish are being harvested sustainably.

In the past, commercial harvests could provide an estimate for the overall population, Mr. Stearns said, but solid numbers were out of reach. In recent years, the data has been purely anecdotal. “There was really nothing to document how the population was doing,” Mr. Stearns said.

Read the full story at the Vineyard Gazette