Conserving Our Fishy Heritage at Cherry Point - State Prepares To Release Final Management Plan

Matt Krogh is the North Sound Baykeeper with RE Sources for Sustainable Communities, and has written for Sustainable Industries and Planning magazines. A 20-year resident of Bellingham, he is a repeat offender at Huxley College with a background in environmental education and geography.

It’s all about perspective. From a herring’s perspective, the bounteous mélange of sea life in the Cherry Point Aquatic Reserve is nothing less than the land of milk and honey. From a Chinook salmon’s, a surf scoter’s or a heron’s perspective, the herring are the milk and honey.

And from our perspective as humans? The Cherry Point Aquatic Reserve is an integral piece of the food web that sustains life in Puget Sound, with forage fish like surf smelt, sand lance and especially herring acting as the link between the vast quantities of invertebrates that they eat and the secondary predators that we value so much.

Historically, the Cherry Point herring spawning stock alone provided more than a third of the herring in the Puget Sound region. The region’s eelgrass and red algae are perfect places for herring to lay eggs, while other forage fish like the sand lance and surf smelt continue to thrive in the nearshore areas of the reserve, great news given recent research emphasizing their importance to salmon.

Salmon snacks like herring, Pacific sand lance and surf melt aren’t the only species in the aquatic reserve, which boasts as many as 61 species of plants and 172 species of invertebrates. Many of Cherry Point’s invertebrates (copepods and other macro-zooplankton) are the pizza and chips of the herring world—that is, the main diet of juvenile herring before they move away from home. With their voracious appetites for all that free-floating protein, herring and other forage fish are the primary creatures making food energy from macro-zooplankton available to secondary predators.

Are the herring really that important, really that crucial a component in the food web that sustains life in the straits and the Sound? So important that they deserve to have an aquatic reserve created, in large part, to protect them? To answer that question on your own, here is a partial list of species that depend on (or at least appreciate) herring for food: Pacific cod, Lingcod, halibut, Chinook salmon, harbor seals, herons, western grebes, common murres, rhinoceros auklets, tufted puffins, orcas, seals, sea lions, Dall’s porpoises and surf scoters.

The surf scoters especially are an interesting part of the ecosystem, timing their migration to the unique late spawning of the Cherry Point stock of herring. While other stocks spawn from January to March, the Cherry Point stock spawns from April to June—an ideal time to see some of the remaining surf scoters, whose population has been in precipitous decline.

Despite the apparent abundance and diversity of wildlife at Cherry Point, the hard part of the story is the decline of the herring stocks—a decline that directly parallels the decline of the surf scoter. Once abundant in waters off Whatcom County, herring spawning biomass was as high as 15,000 tons in the 1970s and supported a new, large fishery.

A short two decades later, all forms of the fishery were closed in 1996 when the herring populations dwindled rapidly, eventually reaching a low of 800 tons in 2000. Spawning biomass currently hovers at around 1,000 tons, while the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates that approximately 3,200 tons of herring need to survive to spawn each year for long-term sustainability of the population. It was this decline in the herring fishery, along with Cherry Point’s importance as a nearshore migratory corridor for Chinook salmon and significant feeding area for migratory birds that prompted the Washington State Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to create the Cherry Point Aquatic Reserve.

Recognizing the area’s ecological importance, in 2000 the DNR withdrew Cherry Point tidelands and ocean floor from competing uses, finalizing their decision in 2003. Without competing uses, the spawning substrates of eelgrass and red algae will be protected, good news for trying-to-recover herring stocks.

Other good news is that much of the shoreline in the reserve is still in excellent shape—only 9 percent has been altered or changed, compared to 32 percent in the rest of the straits and Puget Sound area. The feeder bluffs that contribute sediment to beaches are intact, meaning that Surf smelt and sand lance will keep habitat, and upland habitat for birds is still strong.

One hope is that the reserve will allow herring to spawn throughout the full protected area. Currently concentrated at Cherry Point and Point Whitehorn, herring spawning areas once ranged from Portage Island north along Lummi Island and on up to Point Roberts. It’s unclear why the herring have not yet rebounded; possible reasons include industrial contamination, parasitism and warming sea temperatures.

The bad news is that even with DNR taking responsibility for protecting the tidelands and bedlands of the aquatic reserve, ever-present threats still exist from shoreline residential development, polluted industrial and residential runoff, overfishing, oil and chemical spills, incompatible recreational activities, increased vessel traffic and increased seawalls and bulkheads within the reserve area. Beach-spawning fish are completely vulnerable to large oil spills, with entire populations at risk if an oil spill coats the full intertidal zone.

To address those threats, the DNR developed an Aquatic Reserve Management Plan in coordination with identified stakeholders, including the North Sound Baykeeper. The plan’s purpose is to preserve the ecosystem while allowing industry to continue to operate under the leases the DNR administers.

Having a Management Plan begs various questions: Will it work? Who has agreed to be part of the plan? And will it protect habitat?

The withdrawal of land under DNR’s authority simply means that they will grant no additional industrial leases in the reserve area. Despite creating and administering the Management Plan, the DNR’s authority is limited to designation of the reserve, and authorization and renewal of leases on Cherry Point properties (e.g. BP, Conoco-Phillips and Intalco), as well as facilitating research, monitoring, education and restoration projects. As a result, they have depended on a voluntary multi-stakeholder process to get buy-in and commitment to the plan, and will depend on partnerships with other agencies, nonprofits, businesses and property owners to meet the plan’s goals.

This is where you (and the North Sound Baykeeper team) come in. The last three years have seen the DNR working hard to complete the reserve’s Final Management Plan. The North Sound Baykeeper team has been involved each step of the way, and with the upcoming release of the Final Management Plan, we invite you to make sure that the plan fully protects Cherry Point and that the DNR’s strategy makes sense.

The April 2009 Draft Management Plan laid out some important—and lofty—goals, all of which the North Sound Baykeeper Team supports:

• protecting and restoring water quality

• enhancing the functions and natural processes of aquatic nearshore and sub-tidal ecosystems

• reducing the risk of spills and increasing our capacity to respond to them

• ensuring that future authorizations do not alter natural system forming processes, degrade habitat or result in impacts to key species

• reducing or eliminating sources of invasive species

• addressing and protecting Lummi Nation and Nooksack tribal cultures, values, and treaty rights

But lofty goals without a good implementation plan can be trouble. Without the ability to compel industry, agencies or county government to participate in the plan, the DNR has relied on stakeholders’ participating in good faith. You—a concerned citizen—are one of those stakeholders, and can make a difference by:

1. Commenting on the Final Management Plan

2. Supporting funding of the plan at budget time for various government groups such as the Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Department of Ecology, Whatcom County and the DNR. The Baykeeper team will send out updates as opportunities arise. §