oward the end of March, Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) biologists head skyward in a spotter plane to look for the milky signs of milt that signal spring and the start of sac roe and spawn-on-kelp herring season in Southeast. Spotters report the length of the milt, which can extend for miles, and the number of predators about.

“Typically, sac roe and spawn-on-kelp fisheries occur in the spring—in March, April, and May—with fisheries occurring later as you move north in the state,” says Acting Director of Commercial Fisheries Forrest Bowers. “Timing depends on herring spawn occurrence, which usually occurs earlier in warmer springs and later in colder springs. Food and bait fisheries typically occur in the winter from October through February. Specific openings are established through emergency order.”

Herring has a variety of uses: the Pacific herring, Clupea pallasii, fishery has gone from an Alaska Native communal management of local use of fish eggs to a for-profit industry to sell herring as bait, oil, or fish meal on the open market. The different targeted herring products make this fishery more complex than any other in Alaska.

When herring season opens, a flurry of boats jockey for position with gunwales cheek-to-jowl and nets bobbing side to side. Compared to Alaska’s other commercial harvests, however, the herring fishery is more modest.

Unlike the pollock fishery, where Alaska produces more than half the fish caught in US waters for an average wholesale value of nearly $4.5 billion a year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, herring are practically a footnote.

The Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute’s most recent report on the economic value of Alaska’s seafood lumps herring with the 2 percent of “other species” by volume and value contributing to the $6 billion industry in 2022. The “other” tonnage is on par with crab or halibut, but those harvests are each more valuable.

The herring fishery has been up and down for decades. The greatest fluctuation in its fifty-year recorded history are the years 1996 and 1997, when 1996’s haul was 112 million pounds worth $60 million and, even though the 1997 harvest volume increased somewhat, it was only worth $18 million. Decades later, the fishery is still depressed: the fleet fell from a high of 227 vessel permit holders in 1994 to a low of 60 in 2024.

In 2023, the harvest of 33.7 million pounds of herring was worth $12.5 million, about the same value as a year earlier despite the 94.1 million pound harvest in 2022.

Catch price is determined by canneries, processors, and tenders, but one major factor was the crash of king crab in 2021 and snow crab in 2022. Crabbers use herring as bait, so what happens in one fishery ripples to the other.

“Some herring fisheries are not opened due to low stock abundance and others do not occur because there are no buyers available,” says Bowers. “Not all of these fisheries occur annually because in some years herring biomass does not meet minimum thresholds to open fisheries or there is no interest in purchasing herring in the area,” says Bowers.

Fortunately for bait fishermen, crabbing reopened last fall.

Herring themselves are comfortably plentiful, more than fishers can easily land. Last year, the Sitka Sound spawning population was composed of unusual overlapping pulses of returning 8-year-old and 4-year-old fish. ADF&G forecast more than 800 million pounds of mature herring, resulting in the highest ever allowable catch for Sitka Sound seiners, at 160 million pounds. The estimate was high, with the actual return about half the size. Yet even a more realistic harvest limit would’ve been more than enough: forty-seven permit holders managed to catch about 25 million pounds.

This year, the allowable harvest is half the size, at 73.4 million pounds. ADF&G Sitka Area Management Biologist Aaron Dupuis expected fishers to catch about 2 million pounds per day during the two-week opening.

Dupuis says herring numbers are “robust. The future of the fishery is going to be market driven, not biomass driven.”

Instead of the five processors that bought herring in Sitka last year, only two are processing the catch this season: Silver Bay Seafoods and Icy Strait Seafoods. Consequently, ADF&G was preparing to not publish harvest data.

“Because we will have less than three processors this year, I think this is the first time ever in the history of the Sitka Sound Sac Roe herring fishery, but because of the number of processors, harvest data will be confidential from this year,” Dupuis said during a briefing in March. “That’s state law. There’s no way around it. I wish it were different sometimes, but harvest information will be confidential this year.”

By law, the state can only release confidential fish ticket data only if more than three entities are involved in the fishery.

Then things changed. “Because there were only two processors, both agreed to release the fishery’s data,” says Dupuis.

Fishery managers determine the timing of the Sitka Sound herring opening, usually down to days or even hours before the main spawning event.

On April 1, the aerial survey in Sitka Sound found that, since March 22, a cumulative total of approximately 86.3 nautical miles of herring spawn was observed in Sitka Sound.

The practice for the past two decades has been for commercial seiners to harvest up to 20 percent of the spawning population. The diminished fleet could scarcely hit that cap, and the Alaska Board of Fisheries seriously considered a 15 percent cap at its meeting in Ketchikan in February—but not because of physical limitations.

Subsistence harvesters have called for tighter limits on the commercial catch, and recent Canadian studies suggest a 20 percent harvest rate might be too high for some herring stocks. Based on ADF&G data, Sitka’s herring population has grown, and state biologists are checking if the Canadian research is valid.

Kodiak also has a robust herring fishery, but previously the fish could not be harvested during the sac roe season. That changed in March, when the Alaska Board of Fisheries extended the Kodiak herring fishery and split it into separate seasons, for sac roe and for food and bait.

The commercial fishery for Kodiak herring is now nearly year-round. The sac roe season has three distinct periods which will not overlap with the food and bait fishery, which have openings in late October through November and January through February.

Last year, no fishermen or buyers participated in the Kodiak sac roe fishery, despite near-record biomass levels. This year’s harvest level is 14.5 million pounds for the thirteen districts around Kodiak Island.

Alaska’s largest roe herring fishery is centered on Togiak in Bristol Bay. The roe herring harvest quota at Togiak was set at 82.3 million pounds. However, processors indicated they would not accept Togiak roe herring this season. Lack of buyers also halted the Togiak herring fishery for the previous two years. Bowers explains, “Traditionally the largest market for herring in Alaska is for a sac roe product. That market has declined over the last couple of decades, and current sac roe market demand can be fulfilled by harvest in one or two fisheries per year. For example, in 2025, the only sac roe fishery to occur was in Sitka Sound.”

Highly prized in Japan as kazunoko, the roe sacs or egg skeins are harvested from female herring. The carcasses, and any males, are relatively worthless, either discarded or ground into feed for fish farms. As much as 88 percent of Pacific herring tonnage is never consumed by humans.

Even the roe sacs have lost value. Herring roe sold for more than $0.50 per pound in the ‘90s, but tastes have changed in Japan, driving prices to as little as $.10 per pound.

Reliance on the Japanese market has ingrained habits in the herring fishery. The largest share of each year’s returns is allocated for the roe harvest, as Japanese customers had been demanding for the last fifty years.

“Alaska’s herring roe fisheries have declined in value since the 1990s. The regulatory structure was designed to support a majority of the harvest for herring roe. To facilitate higher value markets and uses for herring, regulatory structures must change,” Board of Fisheries chair John Wood said last year, when the board created a Herring Revitalization Committee.

Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute Food Aid Program and Development Director Bruce Schactler testified, “To change the options and direction for such underutilized Alaska herring, management must change to allow harvest to take place when the herring are past their spawning phase, and into the high fat or better/different stage of life when the fish’s nutritional profile is comparable to all other uses of this valuable State of Alaska resource.”

Other countries enjoy herring smoked or pickled, and Alaskans also harvest herring for subsistence, including eggs plucked from kelp. The revitalization committee is meant to consider changes to seasons and amounts of the various herring fisheries.