Canadian Fisheries Patrol vessel Neocaligus during the herring season monitoring fishing activity on the Salish Sea off Vancouver Island.
Like the foundation of your house, Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) form the foundation on which the Great Bear Rainforest is built. This small silver fish plays a major role in the lives of nearly every coastal species on land or underwater in British Columbia. Like other forage fish, herring are an important link between tiny plankton and larger animals, from humans to whales, wolves, fish, and birds. Each year, in early spring, the waters shine with silver as countless tonnes of herring migrate from offshore waters to nearshore bays and estuaries to spawn together. Pacific herring spawns are short-lived but spectacular natural events. In the Great Bear Rainforest, millions of birds and thousands of sea lions and seals converge with orca, humpback and gray whales to feed on herring. Surf scoters and gray whales time their northward migrations perfectly to feast on the annual herring spawn. Even bears and wolves come down to the tideline to eat herring eggs. Herring can live to spawn up to ten times in their lives. Pacific herring is a forage fish widely considered to be a keystone or foundation species because of its huge productivity and wide interactions with a range of predators and prey. Preferring to spawn in sheltered bays and inlets, the adult herring begin making their way from the open ocean to the spawning grounds in the late winter. When the time comes to spawn, a single female may lay as many as 20,000 eggs, producing a staggering egg density of 6 million eggs per square metre. The resulting pulse of biomass attracts a huge array of predators including sea lions, humpback whales, wolves, bears and a host of bird species. Herring were consistently abundant all along the coast for millennia. A recent archeology study of First Nations sites from Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington found herring were the first or second most abundant fish species at nearly all 171 sites, which dated back 10,000 years
Size: 4218px × 2762px
Location: Salish Sea Vancouver Island British Columbia Canada.
Photo credit: © David Gowans / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., advocate, animals., availability&, canada, crash., decades., declined, events, fertilisers, fish, fisheries, fishery., food, heiltsuk, herring, important, larger, link, marine, nation, nations, oceans, oil., overfishing, plankton, population, precipitously, resulting, season, spawnning, spectacular, springherring, sustainable, temperature., tiny, water
