Counting Herring
Mashpee Volunteers Resume Conservation Of Species As Old As Time
By RYAN SPENCER Apr 23, 2021
The Mashpee Enterprise
A loon surfaced intermittently a few feet off the southern shore of Santuit Pond as several ospreys—recently returned from an intercontinental migration—circled overhead or perched in still-leafless trees.
To a voice memo app on his phone, Jim Carroll noted the date (March 31, 2021), the time (a little past 5:30 PM), the weather (80 percent clouds) and air temperature (11 degrees Celsius, or 51 degrees Fahrenheit).
Mr. Carroll dipped a thermometer over the edge of the Santuit fish ladder, where a few dozen alewife herring gathered in pools. After a moment, he retrieved the thermometer.
“Twelve degrees,” he said. “The water is warmer than the air.”
Then, paying about as much attention to the birds gathered around the fish ladder as they paid to him, Mr. Carroll donned his polarized sunglasses, set a 10-minute timer on his phone and positioned himself atop the small cement bridge that crosses the fish ladder.
Herring Run
Jim Carroll, a volunteer with the herring count program, counts herring at the Santuit fish ladder.
RYAN SPENCER/ENTERPRISE
“This is where the rubber hits the road,” Mr. Carroll said as he leaned on the railing, his gaze fixed on the final stair of the fish ladder that is the threshold between the river and the pond. In his hand he held a digital counter as a few herring swam in the small pool of running water at the foot of the last stair, waiting to make the final ascent.
Mr. Carroll is one of several volunteers who is helping to resume Mashpee’s herring count program after a one-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Multiple times a day, volunteers and town staff count the number of herring ascending into the Mashpee, Santuit and Quashnet rivers in a 10-minute period.
“Herring are what is called anadromous; they spend their adult life at sea but return to freshwater to spawn,” said Katelyn Cadoret, Mashpee’s assistant conservation agent. “They recognize the chemical signatures of each of the rivers and return to those areas to spawn.”
Every spring, hundreds of thousands of adult alewife and blueback herring travel upriver from the ocean to spawn in the same ponds in which they were born. The natural phenomenon is spectacular, with the two anadromous species of herring, often known as river herring, darting through the water as they travel upstream, sometimes by the hundreds, and attracting the various species of wildlife that feed on the fish to the river’s edge.
“You’re witnessing the power of instinct,” Ms. Cadoret said. “You never know what you’re going to see, but [the herring run] attracts all sorts of other wildlife to the area because herring are a really important part of the food chain.”
Some days, volunteers will count more than 100 herring making their final ascent into the pond. Other days, like during the early season count conducted by Mr. Carroll, no herring will make the final ascent in a 10-minute period.
Mr. Carroll, like many a fisherman on Cape Cod, remembers a time when, instead of counting herring, he was taking herring to use as bait while fishing for striped bass.
Herring Run
Jim Carroll shows the device he uses to help count herring.
RYAN SPENCER/ENTERPRISE
“Every herring guaranteed a striper—a keeper, too,” he said.
River herring populations, however, have declined in recent decades, leading Massachusetts in 2006 to implement a moratorium on the taking of herring.
“Forty to 50 years ago, the numbers of herring were just astonishing and you could just see it drop precipitously,” Mr. Carroll said, noting the important role that the two species of river herring play in the food chain of local ecosystems. “If you unthread that web, the whole sweater is going to unthread.”
It remains illegal to harvest herring. The only exception to the rule is for card-holding members of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, whose ancestors have inhabited the coastal region for more than 12,000 years, and can hunt, fish and trap freely because of aboriginal rights written into Massachusetts law.
The documented decline in river herring populations can be traced back as far as the 1800s when there seemed to be a drop in harvest sizes, said Jo Ann Muramoto, the director of science programs at the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, a nonprofit that runs the herring count program in coordination with municipalities on the Cape.
By the 1900s, overfishing and obstructions to fish passage from industries that dammed or redirected rivers took an even more serious toll on river herring populations, Ms. Muramoto said. By the turn of the century, some local herring runs had diminished to the point where only a few river herring—or even no herring—made the passage upstream to spawn in the spring, she said.
In 2011, the same year that the first herring counts began at the Mashpee River in Mashpee, a petition to list the species as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act was rejected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In 2019, federal agencies again determined that alewife and blueback herring populations, although at historic lows, did not warrant a threatened or endangered status. The National Marine Fisheries Service continues to list both blueback and alewife herring as “species of concern.”
“They’re still considered protected because their populations have not really rebounded,” Ms. Muramoto said. “The effect of factory trawlers is believed to be one of the major impacts [on river herring] today.”
Offshore trawlers target Atlantic herring while dragging large fishing nets off the Atlantic coast but often sweep up alewife and blueback herring as bycatch, she said. In 2019, the New England Fishery Management Council created a 20-mile buffer offshore of Cape Cod in which trawlers are not allowed to fish.
Barriers to fish passage, such as deficient fish ladders like the Santuit Pond ladder, also affect herring populations, Ms. Muramoto said, adding that studies are underway to assess the effects of water pollution on herring populations as well.
The herring count program provides data for NOAA and the state division of marine fisheries to assess the standing stock of herring on Cape Cod while also providing data about the success of fish passage restoration and conservation efforts at each river, she said.
Santuit Fish Ladder
The fish ladder at Santuit Pond
GENE M. MARCHAND/ENTERPRISE
“Most of the herring runs that are monitored on the Cape are either runs that have been restored or need restoration,” Ms. Muramoto said. “By getting people outside in the springtime—and we have a lot of avid counters—it helps build a sense of stewardship.”
That sense of stewardship may be necessary to the success of river herring species, and the food webs they support, well into the future as herring populations remain at historic lows.
For members of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, who are among the only people allowed to harvest herring, the precipitous decline in herring in the past century is a threat not only to the environment but also to a way of life that dates back millennia.
“Because we are coastal people, we are connected to the fish and we know when these diadromous fish are coming,” said Marcus Hendricks, a member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe who regularly exercises his aboriginal rights to take herring. “My ancestors would never think that a resource or a gift from Mother Earth would no longer be there.”
For generations, tribal members have eaten smoked herring or fried herring roe and have used herring as fertilizer in the garden and as bait for catching striped bass and bluefish, Mr. Hendricks said. When the herring run begins each spring, tribal members gather with the medicine man for a spring harvest ceremony, he said.
“It’s a concurrent way of life,” he said of tribal members’ aboriginal rights. “No one has taken it from us, and no one has given it to us.”
Because the harvest of herring is closed to the general public, tribal members sometimes face harassment when exercising their aboriginal rights at fish ladders, Mr. Hendricks said.
“A lot of harassment comes from misinterpretation, not being knowledgeable about living amongst indigenous people,” he said, calling for better education on aboriginal rights to prevent harassment. “We’re going to [herring runs to] get food, we’re going there to go get things that are sustenance for our way of life.”
He noted that the Massachusetts Environmental Police or Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal Police should be contacted if an individual believes someone harvesting herring is doing so illegally.
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