Over the past couple of years, the juvenile herring population has begun to stabilize. With a robust year-class in 2012, there’s even a chance that 2015 may bring enough recruitment to reopen a commercial fishery. Despite these gains, W. Scott Pegau, Research Program Manager at the Science Center, said that in many ways it’s only the beginning.
The Prince William Sound Herring Survey Program began in earnest in 2009, funded by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council for a three-year period. The integrated herring restoration plan, made up of ten different individual projects and drafted by the EVOS trustee council in 2010, seeks to identify the factors keeping herring recruitment low enough that the biomass has never really recovered since crashing in the mid ‘90s. The factors are varied and complicated: increased predation, especially by whales, changing ocean conditions, juveniles having trouble overwintering, interspecies competition, or disease. Perhaps the biggest problem for finding out what happened is a lack of data from before the crash; there is little information on what a healthy herring population should look like.
“All the research was after the spill, so only know what the bad times look like,” Pegau said. “We only researched in bad years, low recruitment, so don't know the conditions that led to a strong year class.”
