Our Mission Part 1: The Who

I was planning on waiting until there was something successful to report on the herring front, but unfortunately, like a lot of celebrities, the star of this show is acting up, and refusing to come on stage.

An Atlanto-Scandian Herring A.K.A. Norwegian Spring Spawning Herring

That star is Norwegian Spring Spawning Herring (if you live in Norway), or Atlanto-Scandian Herring (if you live anywhere else). This herring stock (a distinct fish population, kind of) is the largest herring stock in the world.  There are more herring in this stock than there are humans on earth. Individual fish are also larger than those in most other herring stocks getting to around 40cm long, smaller than most humans on earth.  They form dense schools that seemingly move as a single unit. You have probably seen footage of this in documentaries on TV.

A School Of Herring

They also fart, "rasping noises, which sound like high pitched raspberries".  Some scientists won an Ig Nobel Prize for their study on these Frequent And Repetitive Ticks (or FARTs), which is not just a clever abbreviation, but actual farts. It is thought these may be used as some form of communication (presumably for communicating the message "Go away"). See this link for further details.

Pardon Me

Given its immense size, the stock is widely distributed and is what is known as a 'straddling stock'.  This means that it traverses international boundaries, nothing lewd of any sort. At times it is in Norwegian, EU, Icelandic, Faroese and Russian waters.  As a result it is fished by people from all these places. 

Herring (Red) Distribution In The Northeast Atlantic

Herring has been an important fishery species for centuries.  From the early days when fisheries were mainly coastal in nature, to later years when fishermen sailed greater distances and landed fish in greater quantities.  Technological developments and centuries of experience translated into ever growing pressure on the stock.  Never more so than in the 1950s and 1960s.  During this period a large portion of the fishery was in international waters.  Without any firm structures in place for the management of this shared resource, there were very few controls on its exploitation.  Suddenly, a stock that had survived many hundreds of years of fishing was being exploited on a massive scale.

Herring Fishing: circa 1500

Herring Fishing: circa Some Time Ago

Herring Fishing: circa 1950s

In 1966 a total of 2 million tonnes of Atlanto-Scandian herring were caught. It is easy to say that number, but hard to comprehend it. 2 MILLION tonnes.  Based on the numbers landed at age, mean lengths at age and the body shape of an ‘average’ herring, I did a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation: if you took all the herring caught that year (1966 only) and laid them side-by-side on the ground, they would cover an area roughly 164 square kilometres. Again this is an easy number to say, but consider this:

That's twice the size of Manhattan, and exactly the size of Yusufiya, Iraq. Politically speaking, it is the amount of West Bank territory that the barrier wall in Israel will de facto add to metropolitan Jerusalem, and it is also how much land Russia want to take from the Abkhazia breakaway region of Georgia with its draft package of “state border demarcation”.  Sadly, it is the area of land in Azerbaijan that is contaminated by landmines and other unexploded remnants of war, but on a brighter note, it is 1.3 times the size of Disney World.  These herring come mainly from a polar region, but in the tropics they would have completely covered the whole of Easter Island. None of these numbers are made up, by the way. Oh, and if you put it in a perfect disc, it would be more than a marathon to run all the way around it.

Easter Island: Could Have been Covered Completely By Herring In 1966

So now that you have a good idea of the amount of fish I am talking about, you will not find it surprising at all that these quantities were not sustainable.  By 1970 the stock had been brought to its knees.  The exact reason for this inevitable collapse is debateable, but is likely a combination of fishing pressure, improved fishing ability, poor scientific knowledge of the stock, non-reactive management to advice and environmental conditions. A Perfect Storm, if you will.

As you will have gathered, 164 km² means a lot to a lot of people, and the 164 km² of herring certainly meant a lot to the fisherman catching them, as well as the communities they supported.  The complete collapse of the stock in the 1970s lead to virtual closure of the fishery.  Fishermen turned to other target species such as blue whiting, which until that time had been a relatively untapped resource.  Fortunately for Norwegians the oil boom took up a lot of the slack and provided employment for many fishermen who had fallen on hard times, much like is happening in Newfoundland today following the collapse of the Grand Banks cod.

As for the herring, they retreated mainly to the fjords of Norway.  Norwegian surveys in the early seventies found almost no traces of herring at all (I know the feeling). Still, some remained.  One of the positive aspects of commercial fisheries is that fleets will stop fishing once it becomes economically unviable to do so.  Fortunately, this is generally before stocks become ecologically extinct.  This is in contrast to recreational fisheries where linefish species will be fished on until the last one is caught because recreational fisherman are in it for the 'sport', not for the profit.  They are perfectly content to lay in the sun, beer in hand, hook in water, regardless of the catch rate, telling stories about when they used to catch so many more fish, that were much bigger.

Fortunately for the herring, the fjords lay all within one country's national waters, Norway, allowing a unilateral management regime to oversee its recovery. Slowly these refugees from mass slaughter started to rebuild.  One of the Danish crew members, who was living in Harstad in the 1980s, told me that in 1981 there was no sign of herring at all.  But in 1982, the fjords were so full of them you could wade out into the water with a net on a stick and literally shovel out as much as you wanted (sardine run style).  Everybody you met walking out in the street would offer you a bucket of herring.  Strange people these Norwegians. But of course, relative to their once broad distribution and massive numbers, this fjord revival was only the start.  It wasn't until the mid-1990s, almost three decades after the massive collapse, that herring numbers once again reached 'commercially interesting' quantities. That this recovery occurred within Norwegian waters, and that the stock generally spawns there, is why Norwegians like to refer to it as 'Norwegian Spring Spawning Herring'.  Perhaps they have a point.

The stock has been growing almost consistently year on year since then and by 2002 reached pre-collapse levels.  Catches have not increased as sharply and, though current catches are over a million tonnes, the stock is currently well above the 'precautionary spawner stock biomass' of 5 million tonnes of fish in the ocean.  This is a minimum level of abundance thought to be suitable for the stock to function normally.  Over 5 million tons of sexually active herring in the sea.  More than three times the size of Disney World. That's a scary thought. Maybe there is something lewd about this straddling stock.

As it grew the stock spread out once again into international waters. However, a lot of lessons were learnt from the collapse of the early 1970s and the herring returned to an improved political and scientific environment.  Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) of coastal countries had been expanded to 200 miles offshore, reducing the size of the international waters.  Agreements were made on the sharing of the stock amongst countries whose waters were frequented by the stock, and regulations developed for fisheries operating within international waters.  And, importantly, agreements on international research were also penned.  This lead most visibly to International surveys to monitor the size of the stock, which were started in 1996. The design of these, as well as the participants, have changed over time.  Currently the Norwegians, Faroese, Icelanders and EUians, with a little help from the Russians, undertake herring surveys.  In the past the Dutch vessel Tridens was used for the EU part, now it is the Danish vessel Dana.  Irrelevant of the vessel, the scientific crew on board is an international mix representing various EU member states. The cruise I am now on is part of the 15th version of this international herring survey. 

That is why I, a South African, am here representing the Netherlands, aboard a Danish vessel, in the Norwegian Sea.

Dave On The Dana

More on what and why later.