Historical Southeast Alaska Herring Catch

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Reduction Fishery

Records of catch and production from early Southeast Alaska herring reduction plants appear in a number of places. Occasional visitors to the Killisnoo plant for example, such as Scidmore (1885, 1893 and her section in the 1890 census given in U.S. Dept. of Interior 1893) and Inkersley (1895) would record catch from information given to them at the plant. More official-looking catch tabulations are given in Moser (1899) and by the meticulous John N. Cobb (Cobb 1906 is particularly thorough). However, these later "official" authors acquire their data one or two decades after the initial visitors, and after the Killisnoo plant changes ownership. All available historical records were examined and attempts were made to reconcile disparate figures. Table 1 lists the available sources of catch and indicates what appeared to be the most reliable source or "best blend" of the catch information, through the closure of the last plant in 1966.

Figure 1. Southeast Alaska herring reduction fishery catch, quota, and number of operating plants, 1880-1966, based on Table 1.

Herring catch shows a long period of more-or-less constant catch, ranging from 4,000 to 10,000 tons, from 1880 through 1918, when Killisnoo was the only operating plant. It might be argued that these harvests were sustainable regionally, or at least at the edge of sustainabilty. With the intensive capitilization in the early 1920s, there followed three waves of "boom-and-bust" cycles, where peak catches exceeded 40,000 tons annually. By this time, the paucity of herring during the bust cycles had attracted federal regulators, and quotas were enacted to preserve herring for other uses (food, bait, prey for other species). Note that the quotas always lag the catch in the declining phase of each cycle. Fishermen are first unable to find enough fish to catch the quota, then the quota is lowered in the subsequent year. There was no stock assessment focused on abundance estimation, so quotas merely reflected fishing experience from the prior year. The number of operating plants peaks in 1928; as the efficiency of factory processes and vessels increased, fewer plants, fishermen, and vessels could attain the same production as in the earlier, more labor-intensive era.

Table 1. Summary of Southeastern Alaska Reduction Fishery Harvests. The source of (“best blend” of catch estimates is indicated by color and source footnote).