DFO NOT Hearing the Herring!

The DFO has announced they are planning to move forward with a new herring fishery in the Strait of Georgia, BC. This is despite one environmental group’s petition (which garnered over 50,000 signatures!) to stop this fishery. A major argument of Conservancy Hornby Island is that roe herring is a large part of the diet of Chinook salmon, which is a majority of the Southern resident orca diet. Therefore, reducing the herring stock would then ultimately reduce orca health.

Conservancy Hornby Island uses interviews with their president, a previous commercial fisherman, George Scott, to head their cause. The DFO plans to harvest at maximum 20% of the current fish stock per their 2018/19 Pacific Herring Integrated Fisheries Management Plan, which is “based on science,” according to the Fisheries and Oceans Minister, Jonathan Wilkinson.

According to the petition, 90% of the herring fishery catch is ground up and used as food for either farmed fish or cat food. The other 10% is shipped to Japan, as roe herring is considered a delicacy there.

Additionally, Scott claims that an average herring stock once sold for $5,000 a ton, but now sells for merely $150-$700 for one ton because the Japanese demand for roe herring has reportedly diminished. Neil Davis, director of resource management with the DFO, defends the DFO’s decision for a fishery regardless of this alleged fact because the DFO is more concerned with the health of the stock and not the market of the stock. This statement sticks out to me, as sustainability cannot be achieved with only scientific/environmental solutions, but also requires social and economic solutions. For the DFO to say the economy is not their concern implies that sustainability is not their concern.

Much of the argument from DFO officials seems to be that herring stocks in the Strait of Georgia are at a historic high and are consistently stable and are therefore not likely under their management plan to reduce stocks to an unhealthy level. However, much concern from environmental groups is that three of the five current herring fisheries managed by the DFO have recently closed due to low stocks (inferred to be from overfishing). According to a DFO survey of fisheries in 2016, small pelagics stocks (including herring) had only 5 healthy stocks, 7 cautious stocks, 2 critical stocks, and 8 uncertain stocks. That there are more stocks in categories other than the healthy stocks, to me at least, suggests the DFO is not capable of keeping small pelagic fisheries healthy and should reconsider opening more fisheries if those stocks are likely to end up unhealthy.

From the 2016 DFO Status of major fish stocks

The DFO tends to have higher estimates of health in their fisheries than other independent sources, and so I believe the small pelagic stocks are doing worse than the DFO reports.

DFO survey results…

…vs Oceana survey results

Based on arguments from environmental groups and the DFO’s weak responses to concerns and the fact that a majority of the west coast herring fisheries have been closed due to low stocks, it seems to me that the DFO’s decision to move forward with the new herring fishery without seemingly considering public opinion is the wrong thing to do.

Sources (those not previously linked)

Oceana (2018). Fishery Audit 2018: Unlocking Canada’s Potential for Abundant Oceans. Retrieved from fisheryaudit.ca

Herring Fishery image from https://www.change.org/p/mp-jonathan-wilkinson-minister-fisheries-and-oceans-canada-say-no-to-pacific-herring-roe-fishery

Knowing is Half the Battle–Or is It?

The ocean is amazing.

Photo of a coral reef (1)

Photo of a school of fish on a coral reef (2)

Anemones on a reef (3)

The ocean is also in trouble…

Plastic pollution…

iStock photo of plastic pollution floating at the surface of the ocean (4)

Overfishing…

Overfishing and depleting stocks, iStock photo (5)

Climate change…

A coral reef which has been bleached because of anthropogenic climate change. Picture from Atoll Volunteers (6)

… Oh my! Where can we even begin with keeping our oceans healthy? The Vancouver Aquarium offers many programs to help people of all ages from all localities get involved.

ABOUT

The Vancouver Aquarium is located in beautiful Stanley Park, Vancouver, BC and has been part of the Vancouver scene since 1951. It is an OceanWise initiative, and aims to “inspire the global community to become ocean wise by increasing its understanding, wonder and appreciation for our oceans” [1]. Part of achieving this mission is reaching out–inspiring people through experiential education for people of all ages from all around the world. Education outreach programs have been central to the Vancouver Aquarium for over 20 years!

Picture showing a visitor engaging with the Vortex exhibit by Douglas Coupland, on display at the Vancouver Aquarium as part of their mission to reduce plastic waste (7)

PROGRAMS OFFERED

At the Vancouver Aquarium

A wide range of engaging, hands-on programs are offered, ranging from one hour field trip sessions for local schools to week-long immersion camps.

Mobile Programs

Several programs work to give anyone across the country access to the same hands-on experiential learning offered at the aquarium. Programs include the AquaVan, an actual van that drives all over Canada to give hundreds of participants at a time the chance to learn about cool ocean life and how important it is to keep the oceans healthy.

Side view of the AquaVan. Picture from the Vancouver Aquarium website (8)

Online Programs

The Ocean Literacy Course among other online learning programs allow people from all over the world to learn through the Vancouver Aquarium about what they can do everyday to keep it healthy.

IMPACTS

Hundreds of thousands of participants have spent at least one hour learning about how to make a positive impact on the ocean and the organisms that live in the ocean [2]. But did those hours of class time  actually make a change for people or the oceans? It is hard to say given what we know. Currently, we only have how many people have participated in these education programs and how many hours have been spent learning as a way to measure actual change in ocean conservation. While these numbers are immense and represent a huge potential for real-world change, they aren’t the most useful when trying to calculate an exact impact.

Yearly impact of Vancouver Aquarium AquaCamps and club programs

Image showing wide reach of the Vancouver Aquarium online learning programs.

Truncated figure from OceanWise 2017 Annual Report summarizing how many people were affected by the Vancouver Aquarium in 2017

We also have stories from Laura Van Doormaal and Catriona Wilson, who work at the Vancouver Aquarium Education department, about current volunteers who have been to at least one of these education programs and who were inspired by what they learned at the Vancouver Aquarium to work with the ocean when they were a bit older [3, 4]. This is another source of potential impact on ocean health and conservation, but these stories are hard to quantify and have not yet been studied, and so don’t count toward a measurable conservation success–but it does mean the Vancouver Aquarium is inspiring change for some people, which is incredible!

Co-author Kaylie Higgs at the Vancouver Aquarium as a young child, being inspired to pursue a career in ocean science

THE FUTURE

Because so many programs are run and so many teachers and other staff are involved with each unique session, different programs might focus on different topics or discuss different issues. To ensure all their programs are contributing to their goal of creating healthier oceans, the Vancouver Aquarium could centralize and standardize their curricula across all programs. Consistency is key to inducing behavioral change in the name of conservation, after all [5].

Measuring conservation impact requires lots of money, time, and effort. The Vancouver Aquarium could consider implementing post-program surveys for participants to complete a day after the program, a month after the program, and maybe even years after the program. This way, the aquarium can investigate more about how people take what they learn in their programs and turn it into real-world action.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

Educate yourself! Learn what you as an individual can do to support the ocean and the life it supports.

This post was a collaboration project between Elizabeth A. Smith and Kaylie D. Higgs and is a publicly accessible summary of our findings of conservation success at the Vancouver Aquarium for a term paper written for UBC BIOL 420. Further questions can be directed to the blog administrator. 

References (not linked)

[1] OceanWise. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://ocean.org/

[2] OceanWise. (2017). Annual Report 2017. Retrieved from https://annualreport2017.ocean.org/

[3] Laura Van Doormaal, personal communication, February 22, 2019

[4] Catriona Wilson, personal communication, March 7, 2019

[5] Linda Wilson, personal communication, April 2, 2019

[6] Dr. David Anderson, personal communication, March 28, 2019

Pictures

(1), (2), (3) https://unsplash.com/search/photos/coral

(4), (5) https://www.istockphoto.com/ca

(6) http://atollvolunteers.com/coral-bleaching/

(7) https://www.vanaqua.org/explore/exhibit-vortex

(8) https://www.vanaqua.org/education/outreach

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