From the Archipelago: Humming With Herring

The archipelago is humming its soft, sweet song of spring. It's hard to hear in February, more an expectation than a full fledged rhythm, but on my hydrophone, just before the first light of dawn, I can hear them coming. Their voices ripe with life, a swishing, juicy sound like a lemon squeezed over salmon. It's the sound of tons of herring coming home to spawn.

Although vast as a herd of caribou or wildebeest, the sign of herring on the move can be easily missed from topside. But no biomass this immense can pass unnoticed if you recognize their sign upon the sea.

On the cusp of dawn and dark the fish move up and down. At night they rise to feed on surface plankton layers, at dawn they dive to escape the beaks of birds and teeth of dolphins, and their air bladders must adjust. Billions of tiny bubbles are released on each of these vertical migrations and these produce a distinctive sheen on the water's surface. These are the "footprints" of the gift of life, an immeasurable fecundity which turns on the inlets of this coast-one by one in northerly progression.

But the herring aren't the only life that has revealed its presence under the dark moons of February. At night on water, each paddle stroke, or the turning of a propeller, excites the myriad of life we call plankton. Plankton is not an animal, but rather a community that exists only where the water column is penetrated by light. In the plankton float the plants-the phytoplankton- and the animals-the zooplankton. Some of these species light up in response to disturbance and so become apparent as you travel at night.

Pacific Herring grow to 25 cm. (10") Photo: Department of Fisheries and Oceans

All winter the only subsurface lights to be seen were large chunky bursts, one every 4-5 cubic meters. When I traveled north to Bella Bella in mid-February, these chunky lights were rolling along dark seas there too. But when I got home by the 16th of February, Kingcome had suddenly bloomed. The chunky lights were still there, but in the hundreds per square meter, plus microscopic lights were exploding into pools of brilliance, just in time to feed the female herring and their ripening burden of life.

Herring, like salmon, feed the masses in their act of procreation. Unlike us mammals, who must hide away our rare and precious young, the herring cast them upon the sea in numbers which they hope are too great for even the greedy. The moons summon these fish. They can feel the ebb and flood growing larger, building to the full and new moon tides and this is when they spawn. As tiny as a herring sperm must be, so much is released by these spectacular males that the shorelines blanch white and opaque. The eggs adhere to the seaweeds in layers so thick it looks like snow when the tide recedes. The gulls, hungry from the winter months, paddle contentedly along these drifts. Peck and swallow is all they need do now to regain their prime condition.

Seals and dolphins escort the herring. Eagles swoop and dip them out of the sea. Chinook salmon swirl in bronzy, lethal flashes, storing a richness they will bestow upon the forests high above the tidal mark when they spawn later in the year.

As I hear the swishing song of herring on my hydrophone, I expect the March whale-the humpback Iwama. Somewhere far from here I am pretty sure Iwama can hear the herring too, perhaps with his ears, perhaps with his memory, and I scan many times a day for his dark flukes and steamy blows.

It's not easy to be a baby in the sea.Young fish of many species are forced to take a dangerous tour of duty at the surface. It is truly sink or swim. Pilchard, our local stocks of sardines, simply release their eggs into the plankton layer. You can only survive this if your parent's generation was hale and hearty and there are enough cousins floating with you to hide you from a thousand hungry jaws.

Once I sat among feeding gulls, trying to see what they could possibly be eating, looking at what appeared to be an empty sea. After my eyes had adjusted by looking down instead of only at the surface, I saw what resembled a tadpole. Every several cubic meters a fat-bodied fish with brilliant orange fins struggled clumsily along. I scooped one and found a sucker on its chin.

Clearly this was a bottom dweller, designed to attach to rocks. But the fish in my bucket was in a phase so juvenile I couldn't find it in a reference book. What was this little fellow doing on surface? He didn't have the silver sides or high-speed moves required by for surface dwelling. I intended to preserve my sample, but my six year-old deckhand was incensed, "Mummy, that fish is much too cute to kill." And she was right, I photographed my tadpole fish and sent her back among the hungry gulls.

There are two ways of recognizing that an orca is very young. One, its white patches are a distinctive shade of orangeypink. The other is the way it sticks its head out high above the surface with every breath.

I watched a whale being born once, and it became clear there was a message encoded deep within its mammalian DNA- "breathe with mom." The little whale was nearly helpless, its flukes folded together like butterfly wings, its dorsal keel, or fin, flopped over to allow its birth, but when the mother opened her blowhole, the little whale did too-instantaneously.

As whales mature they learn to roll smoothly at the surface, but when they are newborn, one or two sputtering inhalations of seawater make them shy of choking and they explode at the surface, exposing their chin and back to grab a breath before slapping down again.

Baby seals are born quite precocious and able to swim not long after birth, but baby sea lions take longer to become seaborne. Little mergansers trail their mothers, tiny fluffy shadows beneath protective cedar bows; they must avoid the eagles. Young guillemots flop unceremoniously from their spartan cliff-perched nests into the cold water and take life in hand from there. Baby humans fall asleep upon the sea, the gentle rocking no doubt reminds them of their recent home, a sea within their mothers.

There is no better time than spring. The whispers of the herring vanish with the rising sun, but I will listen to them tomorrow because for this place, an archipelago between the inlets, their's is the song of life- where there is herring there is hope.

© Alexandra Morton is a marine mammal scientist and writer in the Broughton Archipelago of British Columbia. wildorca@island.net