A lone herring flopped in Travis Nelson's tin basin. The silvery fish is about 9 inches long, glistening in the afternoon sunlight. Fishing has been slow today, and Nelson is afraid he's missed the spring herring run.
Nelson hurls a cast net on a sunny afternoon off the seawall on Kotzebue’s Front Street. The net has a circular frame, with metal sinkers attached to the bottom.
Nelson launches it, and after a few seconds pulls the line back in, as the bottom of the net tightens to create a purse which would capture herring if they were running.
Nelson is a little frustrated, he just bought a new net and thinks he might have bought the wrong size.
“Usually I get about 60 or 70 each throw,” he said.
After a few throws, Nelson caught just three herring and a tiny smelt. He’s trying to get some for halibut bait for a friend in Anchorage, but said usually he likes to pickle herring. But he’s not the only one that eats what some call a “bait fish.”
Pacific herring are vital to most coastal Alaskan ecosystems from Utqiaġvik, to the Aleutian Islands and down to Southeast Alaska.
That’s according to Bill Carter, the fish biologist for the Selawik National Wildlife Refuge. He said seals, sheefish, even king salmon in Kotzebue Sound enjoy the fatty, marine fish.
“Pretty much anything that can get them in their mouth will eat them,” Carter said.
Further up the food chain some of those animals eventually make their way to humans.
“They feed a lot of things whether it's us directly or things that we like to eat,” he said.
Oral records collected from Iñupiaq elders list several ways herring was traditionally consumed, including dried, baked, salted, pickled and fermented two separate ways. They also ate the sac roe, or herring eggs.
But despite their importance as a subsistence resource, relatively little is known about herring in the Northwest Arctic.
“A part of it is the difficulty of studying them at the time they are present. The big run is when a lot of ice is moving, and it's difficult to find them then,” Carter said. “The other thing is, I think they're not as commercially important here and that drives a lot of research.”
Carter said that the lack of baseline data could be detrimental, especially as climate change heats Arctic waters.
In October 2021, Kotzebue Sound’s herring experienced a major die-off with residents reporting thousands of dead herring washed up on the beaches. The state fish pathologist determined that the cause of the die off was a harmful algal bloom which clogged the fish's gills. As oxygen levels in the water fell, the herring suffocated.
“I would go down and I'd see them just flopping on the beach," said Kotrzebue resident Lance Kramer. “I grabbed one and put it back in the water, it's not going to go. It just comes back up sideways.”
Kramer said the die off was like “a freaky plague” that affected herring miles from Kotzebue.
“Even my uncle, way up Kobuk lake, was seeing dead herring on the beach,” Kramer said. “So a huge die off of herring in a short amount of time.”
Kramer said he's afraid of how another algal bloom event could threaten animals that eat herring like sheefish, a stable fish in the Northwest Arctic.
Carter said in addition to algal blooms, warming sea temperatures threaten the tiny phytoplankton that herring eat.
“Climate change has an effect on everything,” Carter said. “Water temperature is always a driver of marine, freshwater ecosystem health and timing of things. So, if the breakup started really early, and you didn't have the light to support a big phytoplankton bloom, you may have an issue with food for herring.”
And for fishermen like Travis Nelson, that could mean more empty nets in the future.
