Hankering for herring.

• Author: Holmes, Krys
• Position: Alaska's commercial and subsistence herring fisheries

Pursued in Alaska since 700 B.C., herring today is harvested in some of Alaska's most hurried fisheries.

Imagine trying to make a living in a business that can break you or make you rich in the time it takes to read this article. Last year, 97 seine fishermen rode the Prince William Sound herring rodeo for 20 minutes and netted an average of $54,700 apiece.

Herring is a crazy fishery. You can gear up for a month ahead of time, mending nets and throwing money into your boat, scanning Fish and Game bulletins for stock projections and the horizon for early fish and good weather. And then you can blow it all or make a bundle in a herring opening that can last two months or be over faster than a bad haircut, depending on what area you're fishing.

Success or failure in the herring fishery can depend on many things outside a fisherman's control: quantity of roe in the females, accuracy of biologists' predictions about when the roe is ripe, and in the long run, how much of the precious herring roe 122 million people across the Pacific feel like giving each other at holidays. (Almost all of Alaska's herring is exported to Japan for reprocessing and sale as Kozunoko, the valued herring roe.)

The herring fishery has several personalities in Alaska. For about 7,000 people who work seiners and gillnetters, the spring herring runs make a great opportunity to gear up and get the boat running before salmon season. In Hoonah, Prince William Sound and Bristol Bay, some harvesters go after Macrocystis kelp after herring have spawned on it. Japanese consumers eat roe on kelp (called Kosunoko konbu) the way we eat cream cheese on a cracker - except they pay $25 a pound for it. There's a 6,800-ton food-and-bait fishery that starts in August in Dutch Harbor and ends up in Southeast in January. And in Western Alaska, particularly Nelson and Nunivak islands, herring is a major subsistence resource, making up about 40 percent of the local population's diet.

These four major fisheries - the roe sac fishery, roe-on kelp, food and bait, and subsistence - make up a rowdy set of siblings under the cool management hand of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG). But to understand the fisheries, you have to get to know herring a little bit first.

Herring Habitat. The rainbow-backed Pacific herring inhabit shallow waters from San Diego, Calif., to the ice packs of the North Pacific and range as far west as the coast of Korea. Like sardines and anchovies, herring move in that magical way schooling fish do, dipping and turning in unison as though each fish was a silvery scale on a single giant organism.

Herring live out along the continental shelf and feed on plankton, fish larvae and invertebrates on the surface of the water. In turn, their oily flesh makes good eating for salmon, cod, seals, marine mammals and sea birds.

As the ice pack retreats from the North Pacific in the early spring, herring follow the upwelling of nutrients and move northward toward shore. By the time they get to the shallow waters of Alaska's bays and estuaries, the females are fat with eggs (roe) and the males haven't much interest in anything besides squirting clouds of milt into which the females can release their eggs. Each female releases 20,000 to 60,000 eggs, which coat the kelp, sea grasses, rocks or muddy bottom of the bay in layers so thick 1,000 eggs per square inch - that from the air the mass looks like spilled milk.

Surviving eggs become larvae after two or three weeks and grow to two-inch juveniles by eight weeks. These juveniles form a huge kindergarten offshore, comprised of millions of fish, which more or less hang out together through the school...