A citizen scientist project to photograph Pacific herring spawn along the West Coast, from Alaska down to California, has been underway for close to two months. It is based in the Comox-Courtenay area, and one of its many partners is the Friends of Cortes Island (FOCI).

Project lead Jacqueline Huard, a scientist with Project Watershed,  explained, “I work with the Coastal Forage Fish Network. We are very community scientist based and working on a herring project in iNaturalist just was a natural fit for us. I wanted to encourage the folks that we work with to put their data somewhere where they could also access it. The goal is twofold, both to collect some data and address a gap, but also to get it out to the public and have a publicly available data set for the public created by community scientists.”

“There already is lots of work on herring, particularly by DFO, some First Nations, some nonprofit and academics, but a lot of that is inaccessible. Some of it is publicly available. You can go on to a Canadian government website and download data, but It’s hard to know what you’re looking at and iNaturalist has such an easy to use platform.”

“So, we are creating a database of where herrings spawn. It’s easy to access on iNaturalist where anyone can go and search. Whether it be, say, a scientist in the future wanting to make a model of where the habitat is, or identify smaller spawns, or find out how does climate change impact the spawn? Or maybe someone just wants to know, ‘Hey, I live on the coast. I want to know if there’s a spawn in my area?’ That was one reason why we decided to do this and why we think it’s important to get information out there in one place for anyone to access.”

“This is just such an easy way to do it. We’re all snapping photos anyway, of that beautiful herring spawn water when it gets that milky white colour and there’s birds and sea lions everywhere. It’s so easy  to create a central hub for all of that to go.”

“For anyone who is reading this and is interested in joining, you need a camera and an iNaturalist account. iNaturalist accounts are free.  Volunteers go out to beaches and whenever they see either herring eggs or the herring spawn itself, that’s the classic milky white water,  you take a photo, make sure you know what day it was and ideally where you are. You can take  a GPS location from Google Maps, or if you open the iNaturalist app on your phone, it will take it for you. Upload the photo of your observation and it’ll ask you what you’re seeing. To be included in this project, you have to include that it was an egg stage.”

Cortes Currents: Why is it important to document herring spawn?

Jacqueline Huard: “Have you heard of the Adult Salmon Diet Program? It’s a brainchild of Will Duguid, who was a postdoc at the time with the Francis Juanes lab at the University of Victoria  They worked with anyone who was out fishing,  and  looked at what was in the stomachs of those salmon. What they found is that in the Salish Sea, herring make up the majority of salmon prey.”

“Herring are at the base of our food systems. We live in a cold water coastal ecosystem and as the seasons change, we get this upwelling effect where water from the deep part of the ocean gets pushed up with various seasonal winds, and that creates plankton blooms and that plankton gets eaten by forage fish and the key forage fish here in our ecosystem is herring.  Herring is eaten by everything,  but particularly the things that we care about, like salmon, whales and many seabirds.”

Cortes Currents: You mentioned  DFO is already doing this.

Jacqueline Huard: “DFO does a lot of work already,  but sometimes they miss the smaller or earlier or late spawns.  There’s dive surveys and flyover surveys with fixed wing aircraft. Some of you may have seen it. It’s a really cool red airplane that flies really low. It follows fishing boats sometimes at this time of the year. In the spring, it looks for herring spawn but on days where it’s really cloudy, or there’s fog,  or if there’s really bad weather, that plane doesn’t fly. They might miss spawns that happen on that day and the plane can’t just simply be everywhere. There are some gaps. DFO already works with citizen scientists.  There’s a call in line and that has been what has worked for them for many years but  it just doesn’t have a huge outreach and iNaturalist already does.”

Cortes Currents: Tell us about Project Watershed.  

Jacqueline Huard: ”Project Watershed is primarily based out of Courtenay Comox, but we do work on forage fish projects  across the province.  We  focus on the southern part of the province just because that’s where the data is so far.  We work as one organization that is part of the Coastal Forage Fish Network, There’s seven big key organizations that are part of this network and many of those organizations work with smaller organizations. The Friends of Cortes Island is one of the smaller organizations, and they work very closely with Project Watershed.”

Cortes Currents: Huard became involved with Project Watershed after studying Pacific sand lance for her Master’s degree at UBC.

Jacqueline Huard: “Sand lance are really important to a lot of species, just like herring. They’re particularly important to seabirds during the nesting season because sand lance are like a skinny fish without any spikes.  They’re  like a big fat udon noodle that is really easy for a chick to swallow down. So many seabird colonies depend on sand lance, yet we don’t really know where this fish is. We don’t know where it spawns. We don’t know how many there are. We don’t know if the population is doing well. It was pretty easy to carve out a master’s project.  The last three years I was doing that, I just got really deep in the forage fish world. There’s so many questions.”

“As I was coming to the end of that degree, I reached out to Project Watershed who were in the process of  doing some big three year planning and suggested that we work together.  I had built a model looking at where sand lance spawn in the Salish Sea. And I said, ‘let’s do that again on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and then let’s take it rest of the BC coast.’   That’s how I ended up here, and part of my role is to advise the Coastal Forge Fish Network.”

“I primarily focus my work on Sand lance and Surf smelt, but I know that herring is really important. This was an easy way to start us off. There’s a lot of interest and passion by people wanting to do forage fish work”

Cortes Currents: How successful has the Pacific Herring Spawn And Nurseries project been in collecting observations?

Jacqueline Huard: “On February 6th, before this program really started,  there were already 77 observations from 53 people on iNaturalist of herring spawn.  Today, if you go onto iNaturalist, you can see that there’s 243 observations from 134 people.  That number has grown quite a bit and I  don’t think it’s just because it’s herring season.”

“We put this together and we started putting the word out. When I look at the map, it’s very concentrated and I would like to see it grow.  There’s herring spawn occurring in places beyond what I see on the map right now.”

“There’s  a handful all the way up in Alaska and a handful all the way down in California. Most of them are here in the Salish Sea, and on the east side of Vancouver Island.  That does make sense because that is where there is the biggest spawns that we have been seeing in the last few decades.”

“Cortes is involved. We primarily work with Sabina Leader Mense from the Friends of Cortes Island. They informally call themselves Team Sweevy, which is a nickname for  surf smelts which are mysteriously missing from the Northern Strait of Georgia. Sabina mostly does a really great job running her own show. When it comes to forage fish  we work closely together, and she shares her data with us, and then we get that data and put it on the Strait of Georgia Data Center.”

“There’s herring spawn occurring in places beyond what I see in the map right now. I know that there have been recent spawns in False Creek,  in Port McNeill, and I’m sure there are more around Powell River. There’s not as many points on the map in these other areas outside of the east coast of Vancouver Island. I’m hoping to see that grow and particularly further north where the communities are smaller and there’s just less attention.”  

“I think it’s also important just to mention that  some people are concerned that  by putting these observations on a map it could draw additional fishing pressure and possibly increase regulation. There’s fear out there and that’s understandable.”

“You can  make the observation and hide the exact location.It’s called masking, and  often occurs when people want to report, say, a rare bird or a species at risk, and they don’t want  that individual to get papavrazzied and disturbed. You can use a mask and then that way it isn’t publicly shared,  but it gets included in the overall numbers and,  it can sometimes be accessed by researchers who go through additional ethical approvals or whatnot.” 

Cortes Currents: How long does this season last? 

Jacqueline Huard: “This herring season starts  as early as late January for a few communities. Most of them peak  in March.  Some go as late as May. I think I’ve heard of even June, but  I look forward to this data set growing and for us to learn more.” 

Cortes Currents: How long is this project going to be going on? 

Jacqueline Huard: “Well, I hope indefinitely. There’s no reason not to.  Another great thing about iNaturalist is it grabs observations that already meet what we’re looking for.  The oldest observation that already exists in this dataset goes back to 2002.” 

“If people have older observations of herring spawn on their computers or on their phones,  they can upload those. You’ll need a date and you’ll need to roughly know where it happened. It doesn’t have to be exact coordinates, but you have to know  what bay or beach it was in.” 

Cortes Currents: What’s the next step for this project?

Jacqueline Huard: “The next step  in this work, I think, is to come up with a bit more of a formal community science survey at the Coastal Forage Fish Network. We have formal surveys for Sand lance and Surf smelt, and it would be really great to see us have some formal surveys for herring.”

“The Marine Stewardship Initiative, a nonprofit group based out of Howe Sound, is doing really great community led monitoring work on herring.  They are part of the network  and  I’m hoping that they’re going to be able to help show us how to do these surveys a bit more formally, because the thing with iNaturalist is that you’re only collecting observations about when that species was seen. You’re not saying when you didn’t see it, which is also important in science.  A formal survey would allow us to also create an understanding of when spawning isn’t happening, or at least when you aren’t seeing it. That will be our next step.  I think it’ll be pretty achievable and I’m hoping to see us roll it out next year.”

Links of Interest

• The Pacific Herring Spawn and Nurseries page on iNaturalist
• The Project Watershed website
• The Forage Fish page on FOCI’s website
• Articles about forage fish like Herring, Pacific sand lance, and Surf smelt on Cortes Currents.

Top image credit: Herring Roe – Photo by Greg Schechter via Flickr (CC BY 2.0 DEED)

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