‘We Need Our Fish Back’

When river herring scouts arrived in Squibnocket Pond in March 15 years ago, the natal herring population in Aquinnah was estimated to be more than 750,000. Scientists at the Wampanoag Environmental Laboratory recently counted fewer than 12,000 herring entering their age-old spawning grounds.

In the early spring each year, mature river herring travel from the Atlantic Ocean into Menemsha Pond, pass through the Aquinnah herring run, and end their long trek in Squibnocket Pond where they eventually spawn. The small creek that has carried generations of fish into and out of the pond each year was at one time so productive that it sustained all the osprey, cormorants, otters, and even local fishermen that drew from it. But the herring run in Aquinnah is no longer bursting with fish.

“It’s a shockingly low number,” Bret Stearns, Natural Resources Director for the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), told Bluedot Living. Although Stearns said this year’s herring numbers were particularly diminished, Aquinnah river herring populations have declined consistently each season since 2020. Stearns recalled a time when the run was bustling with social and economic activity. Trucks loaded with barrels of silvery-blue fish came and went, and clouds of seabirds swarmed the torrent of scales that flooded into the pond on a daily basis. “Before the moratorium in 2005, the fish came in so thick they would essentially knock you down if you were standing in the run; they’d be losing oxygen because there were so many coming through at once,” Stearns recounted. “When we would sit there at the side of the creek at 5 am with nets in our hands, we never thought it would end.”

The Wampanoag Tribe has historically harvested herring from the run to use as a staple in daily life. Herring were eaten, and used as bait and fertilizer. Herring were also commercially harvested from the run and sold — at times, literal tons of fish and cut roe (fish eggs) would be distributed, most commonly for food, or as lobster bait. Buddy Vanderhoop, a Wampanoag tribal elder whose family has been catching river herring for generations, said that even before he could walk he would go down to the run with his father to fish. “And later, when I was about six,” Vanderhoop said, “I’d come back home covered in scales and mud, carrying a string with about ten herring tied on — I was proud because I caught them by hand.”

Each year, when the shadbush would begin to bloom on the Vineyard, Vanderhoop prepared his net and headed down to the run. In the early ‘70s he made a business of fishing for herring, and pulled 2,000 to 4,000 pounds of fish every couple of days. “We would start pursing the net around the pool, and the fish would charge to the other side — there were so many that they would lift the net,” he said. Even after hauling such a massive amount of fish, Vanderhoop let tens of thousands swim upstream. For generations, herring constituted much of Vanderhoop’s livelihood. He cut hundreds of pounds of herring roe each week and sold it to markets or directly to customers for six or seven dollars a pound. “That would be good money today, but it was even better money back then,” Vanderhoop said. After he cut the roe away, he took the fish and fileted them, then cut them into bite-size pieces for pickling. 

Aquinnah Wampanoag elder Kristina Hook said that river herring were used as a food source long before they were commercially sold. Aquinnah had no electricity until 1951 — it was the last town in the state to tie into the power grid. “So salting and drying the fish was imperative, because there were no freezers,” Hook said. When Hook was a little girl she would go down with her brothers and dip her net into the run. She pulled in as many herring as she could carry while her mother waited at home with plenty of salt and a brown paper bag. “Mother would gut them, pack them in layer after layer of salt, and wrap them up,” Hook said. The fish cured in the salt until spring rain washed it off, then the summer sun arrived to fully preserve them. The Aquinnah Wampanoag have harvested herring for thousands of years, Hook said, with the understanding that they would never take any more than they needed. 

Vanderhoop’s herring business was in full swing shortly before the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries placed a moratorium on the commercial harvest of river herring in 2005 in an effort to restore the population. He was making tens of thousands of dollars selling roe and pickled herring, and even more money selling the fresh fish. Vanderhoop said he believes the ebbing herring population in Aquinnah is largely due to midwater trawlers and seine boats from Gloucester, New Bedford, coastal Maine, and New Hampshire taking what’s known as a bycatch, when fishermen unintentionally catch fish species while fishing for other species or sizes. “It’s a sad thing that’s happening,” Vanderhoop said. “Even if I was to fish the run, I would hardly fill more than a barrel as it is right now. Meanwhile these big companies offshore are filling boats with [sea and river] herring and making boatloads of money.” Fishing vessels are allowed to sell their limited bycatch. 

Vanderhoop was recently elected to the New England Fishery Management Council to support the river herring fishery. He just proposed an amendment to the council that would move midwater trawlers and seiners 20 to 25 miles off the coast of the Vineyard during spawning times. “Now that I am on the commission, I am trying to turn things around here,” Vanderhoop said. “At this point I haven’t had herring roe in three years. The tribe isn’t even touching them. Everyone just wants to leave them be and let their stocks replenish.”

For Stearns, organizations like the Division of Marine Fisheries (DMF) have the opportunity to enact the greatest positive change by establishing stricter enforcement procedures to limit commercial bycatch. “I think people really care about these resources, but right now we are heading down a bad road,” Stearns said. “Why is Cape Cod called Cape Cod? It used to be a place where cod were everywhere, but now that’s just a name. If we don’t stop what’s happening with Herring Creek, soon it could be just another creek.”

Once Stearns and the team at the Wampanoag Environmental Laboratory, led by lab manager Andrew Jacobs, recognized the drastic dip in the herring population, they started looking at the physical aspects of the run. They realized the run was becoming extremely shallow in certain places, so they dredged it in 2020. “We opened up the stream so it was wider and deeper — we were concerned that the narrowing was allowing for increased predation,” Stearns explained. Although clearing out the run didn’t immediately improve fish numbers, it allowed the fish to more easily pass through.

Scientists at the lab are looking at other local factors that might be contributing to the problem at the creek, such as water quality and environmental changes that are enabling predators to gain access to the herring. “We don’t have the ability to control a lot of what happens out in the ocean, but we can try to create the most accommodating ecosystem for our fish right here,” Stearns said. “Because at this point every fish counts, and we need our fish back.” Water quality plays into the overall health of the pond and the potential for herring to spawn successfully. The tribe has been testing the water in the pond for more than 25 years, looking at salinity, nitrogen levels, sedimentation, and more. As of now, scientists haven’t identified any major changes in water quality that might impede the fish’s ability to proliferate. 

Seasonal storms cause massive amounts of sediment to wash into the pond each year, creating eutrophication (excessive richness of nutrients). Now dense patches of phragmites and a sheen of algae cover the shallow areas of the pond. Water quality tests indicate a change in nutrient load over the years, but Jacobs said there is no clear correlation between diminishing water quality and herring spawn rates.  Squibnocket Pond has been under an algae bloom advisory for years, but areas deeper in the pond where river herring normally spawn are clearer.

As more opulent summer homes are constructed in Aquinnah, and people continue to lose sight of humanity’s oneness with the natural world, Hook said the essential fabric of the Indigenous community that has existed here for 10,000 years will continue to erode. “The swamp at Squibnocket used to be a place where you could gather cat-o-nine tails — it was bountiful. Now you can’t even put your foot in the swamp,” Hook said. “The herring are warning us — things need to change, and quickly.”

In 2015, the lab worked with DMF to install an advanced underwater fish camera that is now capable of counting how many fish are coming and going throughout the season. Jacobs and his team worked for years to fine-tune the tracking program so it could accommodate such a unique waterway and species. “Our system here is semi-tidal, it’s semi-saline, there are multiple species coming and going, and water clarity is definitely an issue [when it comes to tracking fish],” Jacobs said.

Lab scientists this year discovered a new dynamic that could be affecting herring spawning times and reproduction rates. Early in the season, before the first schoolie striped bass was caught in Vineyard waters, the fish tracker picked up a parade of striped bass exiting the Squibnocket Pond system. The presumption at the time was that these bass were foregoing migration and wintering in the pond so they could intercept the arriving herring. Generally, when striped bass stay in an estuary, marsh, or salt pond, it’s because they are trapped. But the pond system in Aquinnah is almost constantly flowing, meaning that the fish aren’t stuck — they are purposefully sticking around. “And we aren’t seeing just one or two striped bass holding over. We saw more than 100 fish leave all in one burst just this year,” Jacobs said. According to Jacobs, it was one of the first times this behavior has been documented by scientists.

In order to confirm this novel behavior, Jacobs and the lab team partnered with the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory to insert acoustic trackers in 20 bass that were captured in the pond. They placed three receivers in the pond to detect where the fish were, and one directly outside the pond to determine when they were coming and going. Jacobs anticipated that at least one or two would hold over in the pond. “We wanted to prove that, without a doubt, these fish were doing this — 19 out of the 20 that we tagged stayed in the pond throughout the winter,” Jacobs said.

Although this was a profound discovery, Jacobs said bass are likely not decimating the returning herring population as much as offshore fishing operations are with bycatch. “This might be a piece of the puzzle that was missing for us, and it might be the most significant local impact,” Jacobs said. By referencing new genetic studies that are able to pinpoint where different populations of river herring originate from, scientists have determined that about 50 percent of the river herring bycatch in the New England region is coming from waters in between Nantucket Sound and Long Island Sound, according to Jacobs. “So at this point it’s pretty clear that bycatch is disproportionately affecting us,” Jacobs said.

According to Massachusetts Environmental Police Colonel Patrick Moran, it’s impossible for officers who enforce bycatch limits to determine how much river herring is in a net versus sea herring. “You just can’t do it. Sure, you could take a few totes of fish and test them, but unless you sample the whole catch, how are you going to know?” Moran said. Sea herring grow larger than river herring, and while river herring return to freshwater systems to spawn, sea herring spend their entire lives in the ocean. 

Although officials acknowledge the importance of reducing bycatch, Division of Marine Fisheries Diadromous Fisheries Project Leader Brad Chase said there are many complex dynamics at play. Over the past 15 years following the moratorium, Chase said state and regional groups are looking to reduce total bycatch, and limit the interactions between commercial fishing vessels and river herring. “The New England Fishery Management Councils are working on this, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission is working on this — right now river herring bycatch is limited to 5 percent of each total sea herring catch, and there are lots of policies being created to reduce that impact,” Chase said.

The only way to reduce river herring bycatch is by making regulations more strict. But stricter regulations are only effective if they’re enforced and followed, which is hard to do with a net filled with a football field worth of fish. 

Two traditional river herring waterways have been reopened in Massachusetts in the past few years, giving experts hope that other runs across the Commonwealth will once again flow with fish. The Nemasket River in Middleborough and the Herring River in Harwich have both been reactivated and are open for harvest, and Tribal people and members of the public can celebrate that traditional harvest. “But for many of these runs that are so depleted, I think we should hold the course, protect them, and look for ways to restore them,” Chase said.

In April, the Tribe submitted a letter to the New England Fishery Management Council urging them to consider measures to ensure river herring can return home to repopulate. Jacobs pointed to other similar-size runs, such as one in Maine, where the river herring population has rebounded. He is optimistic that, once the fish reintegrate with the ecosystem, the Tribe will create a responsible management plan and the species will once again proliferate.

But for that to happen, Jacobs said the state needs to push mass-catch fishing practices like midwater trawlers away from Vineyard waters. The Tribe also encouraged the Council to create more stringent bycatch limits, require onboard and portside observers who monitor bycatch, and use genotyping to avoid disproportionately affecting certain herring populations. 

Andrews said the Tribe has always harvested traditional cultural resources in a responsible way — “there has historically been a clear understanding of what is utilization, and what is exploitation,” he said. “Eventually we would like to serve as an example for other communities that want to implement local practices to safeguard their herring. We’re ready. The only thing we’re missing is our fish.”