Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Pacific Herring. Locals have been catch-
ing and eating Pacific Herring since the
first humans settled around the bay. Na-
tive Americans stretched their herring
nets between two tule balsas, and
weighted the edge with stone sinkers.
According to UC Berkeley's Kent Light-
foot, they also collected herring thrown
up on the beach by storms.
(Ryan Bartling)
Pacific Herring collect in the bay starting in November and ending in
March. The second and third waves of fish are typically the largest. After
that, the Golden Gate becomes a revolving door as schools arrive, lay and
fertilize their eggs, then return to the ocean. Herring may reprise this trip
every year for their 11-year lifespan.
Herring will deposit their eggs on virtually any hard surface. In some
months, San Francisco's entire waterfront, from Marina Green to Hunter's
Point, may be covered with herring roe as ripe, full-bellied females unload
a clutch of 4,000 to 134,000 eggs on any available rock, pier piling, sunken
log, shipwreck, riprap block, and waterfront wall. Eelgrass blades and
algae mats are also favored substrates. The fish have made a few modern
adaptations too, spawning on the plastic mesh sacks used to package rice.
As female after female spawns on the same surfaces, some places ac-
quire coatings of eggs up to nine layers deep. By late in the season, the
pilings look like they're wrapped in tan rubber bands, says Oda.
The spawning of Pacific Herring is one of the easier wildlife events to
witness. Anyone out on a lighted dock or breakwater in the evening, espe-
cially after a storm, might catch a swirl of activity in the waters below. “If
you're in the right place at the right time, you can actually see it happen-
ing,” says Oda's colleague Becky Ota, who managed the bay's commercial
herring fishery for the California Department of Fish and Game for 10
years. “You'd see fish madly swimming around the piling—females getting
really close to those pilings with their vents and depositing those eggs, and
males zipping around and releasing milt. One morning I was headed over
the Golden Gate Bridge very early and I knew right away there was a
spawning event going on because the water at Fort Baker was just white
with milt.”
Once they've deposited their eggs, adult herring return almost imme-
diately to the ocean. The egg masses left behind in the bay, meanwhile, at-
tract gulls, Surf Scoters, and sturgeon. Within the 10 days or so it takes
each batch of herring eggs to hatch, up to 95 percent are eaten. Eggs that
aren't fodder for animals higher up the food chain develop from larvae to
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