For a small fish, herring has had a big impact on human societies of the North Atlantic. It was “the most remarkable of fish”, according to James Travis Jenkins in his 1927 book, The Herring and the Herring Fisheries – captured and consumed by the first peoples to live in coastal settlements and “the only fish which has been the cause of several wars”.
Jenkins enthused that the fishery “has been pursued from time immemorial in the same waters and at the same time of year with ever-increasing catching power without in the least degree showing any signs of diminution due to overfishing. In fact the fishery, in spite of its being easily the greatest in the world, is still capable of enormous expansion.”
He went so far as to ascribe British maritime supremacy at the time “to a greater extent than most people suspect, dependent on our herring fisheries”.
The key to this great success was down to the fish’s biology and ecology. Its flesh is firm and oily, ideal for salting or pickling, and so easily preserved. A calorie-rich, protein-packed, tasty staple that could travel long distances without spoiling. And it was abundant, really abundant.
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One account from Scotland from 1780 recounts how “a large shoal of herrings appeared, accompanied with vast numbers of whales and porpoises beating the water into a foam for several miles”. This extended around the Irish coast. In the late 1800s it was reported that Lough Swilly had enough herring “for all the boats of Europe” and that they gathered in such dense shoals that it was “difficult to row through them”.
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Although the appearance of the herring was notoriously unpredictable, the fishery sustained dozens of communities around the coast for centuries as part of a mixed economy that included other fish species as well as farming.
Writing in Cladaí Chonamara (the shores of Connemara), first published as Gaeilge in 1938, Séamus Mac an Iomaire called an scadán (the herring) the “king of fishes”. “They come in from the strange abyss each year without fail – and fishermen are surely full of joy – they give many thanks to God for having driven this valued harvest towards them.”
Mac an Iomaire noted how “spur dog, dogfish, tope, sharks and other fish make a meal of [the herring] and gannets, gulls and shags watch for their opportunity to steal away the remains of the hunt into the air”. This points to the fact that the immense shoals of herring were a key part of the ocean ecosystem and relied upon by all manner of beasts, as well as humans.
Herring is a very important species. A lot of fish and marine mammals prey on herring, while a lot of plankton-eating fish eat herring eggs ... they are quite key in the ecosystem
— Cormac Nolan
The belief that these fisheries were too large to overexploit, however, was no match for the technological leaps of the 20th century that saw ever bigger boats, with bigger nets and bigger holds, along with advances in sonar location that left fewer and fewer places for the fish to hide.
Soon the boats were catching so many herring that they didn’t know what to do with them. In its first annual report in 1953, the newly formed Bord Iascaigh Mhara, to this day the State body charged with the exploitation of sea fisheries, said development of the fishing industry “must be the revival on a larger scale of herring fishing” and that “this revival can take place if the problem of the disposal of the catch is solved”.
The solution was turning the herring into fishmeal, a process that involves reducing the fish to a brown powder which can then be fed to livestock, pets or, these days, farmed fish. A factory for this purpose was built shortly thereafter in Killybegs.
In his chronicle of the herring fishery in Ireland, John Molloy recalled how “the late 60s and early 70s were the real ‘bonanza years’ in the fishery and there was an expectation that this period would simply go on forever and that things would never change ... nobody ever spoke of the possibility of overfishing”. By the late 1970s the fisheries were being closed completely, and although they would subsequently reopen, the bonanza was over.
Today the science paints a sorry picture. Cormac Nolan is a fisheries scientist for the Marine Institute and is on the herring assessment working group with the International Council for the Exploration of the Seas (ICES), which is the principal scientific body for fisheries and ecosystem management in the Northeast Atlantic.
Herring is a “very important species. A lot of fish and marine mammals prey on herring, while a lot of plankton-eating fish eat herring eggs ... they are quite key in the ecosystem”, he says. However, catches of herring are now “much reduced” and this has clearly affected the fishery, but the impacts to the wider ecosystem are, he says, harder to discern and have not been fully evaluated.
ICES divides the herring around Ireland into three management units, or “stocks”, although how much these reflect actual patterns in nature remains debatable. The stock in the north and west of Ireland remains very small but is believed to be recovering. The stock in the Celtic Sea, to the south of Ireland, is in total collapse, with the fishery effectively closed since 2020.
In the Irish Sea the stock was assessed as being healthy, at least from a fisheries perspective, until last year, when there was a “substantial revision” after ICES discovered an “error” in their modelling. The stock, it turns out, is not healthy and is being overfished. ICES now recommend that fishing for herring in the Irish Sea be shut down for 2025. For how long, no one knows.
Fisheries exploitation tends to look at the fortunes of a single species, rather than ecosystem as a whole. But Nolan says there is another way. New models are being developed that would base advice not only on exploitation from a commercial point of view but on how many fish should stay in the sea for the other wildlife that depend on them – and, presumably, so they can perpetuate themselves as a species in their own right.
It has been acknowledged for some time that this “ecosystem approach” would lead to more ecologically sustainable management of marine resources – indeed, it is enshrined in the EU’s Common Fisheries Policy. However, it remains unimplemented.
Politicians have been notorious for ignoring the advice of the scientists at ICES, which has led to chronic overfishing across Europe. Yet if herring are to recover their role in the marine ecosystem, Nolan believes it is as simple as sticking to the limits that have been set.
“If you look at the Celtic Sea, that has been in a very poor state before ... It was at a very low point; advice was given, action was taken and it did rebuild, and there was a fishery on it again for 10 years or so after that.” But then the population started to decline again. He believes “there’s more at play here than just fishing”.
Herring, which need cold water for spawning, is affected – like all marine life – by climate change, and particularly in Ireland where it is at the southern limit of its range. Nolan highlights how not only are the fish fewer in number, but “the mean weights of fish have all decreased in the last 10-15 years”; the fish are not as fat as they once were, perhaps pointing to changes in the plankton upon which they feed.
Herring are unique in that although they roam the open sea in large shoals, they congregate in well known spawning beds around the coast where they lay their billions of eggs on gravelly sea floors.
These are vulnerable to bottom trawling and there are no measures in place to protect these spawning beds from damaging activities. When the department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage carried out an analysis of the Irish and Celtic Seas to inform the likely location of future Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), the authors “supported the idea of protecting spawning grounds”.
However, like implementing an ecosystem-based approach to commercial fishing, and the designation of MPAs in law, the actual measures to protect herring on their spawning grounds remains no more than a good idea waiting for the political commitment to take action.
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