Dana Lepofsky

Archaeological data provide alternative hypotheses on Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) distribution, abundance, and variability

Significance Over the last century, Pacific herring, a forage fish of tremendous cultural, economic, and ecological importance, has declined in abundance over much of its range. We synthesize archaeological fisheries data spanning the past 10,000 y from Puget Sound in Washington to southeast Alaska to extend the ecological baseline for herring and contextualize the dynamics of modern industrial fisheries. While modern herring populations can be erratic and exhibit catastrophic declines, the archaeological record indicates a pattern of consistent abundance, providing an example of long-term sustainability and resilience in a fishery known for its modern variability. The most parsimonious explanation for the discrepancy between herring abundance in the ancient and more recent past is industrial harvesting over the last century. Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii), a foundation of coastal social-ecological systems, is in decline throughout much of its range. We assembled data on fish bones from 171 archaeological sites from Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington to provide proxy measures of past herring distribution and abundance. The dataset represents 435,777 fish bones, dating throughout the Holocene, but primarily to the last 2,500 y. Herring is the single-most ubiquitous fish taxon (99% ubiquity) and among the two most abundant taxa in 80% of individual assemblages. Herring bones are archaeologically abundant in all regions, but are superabundant in the northern Salish Sea and southwestern Vancouver Island areas. Analyses of temporal variability in 50 well-sampled sites reveals that herring exhibits consistently high abundance (>20% of fish bones) and consistently low variance (<10%) within the majority of sites (88% and 96%, respectively). We pose three alternative hypotheses to account for the disjunction between modern and archaeological herring populations. We reject the first hypothesis that the archaeological data overestimate past abundance and underestimate past variability. We are unable to distinguish between the second two hypotheses, which both assert that the archaeological data reflect a higher mean abundance of herring in the past, but differ in whether variability was similar to or less than that observed recently. In either case, sufficient herring was consistently available to meet the needs of harvesters, even if variability is damped in the archaeological record. These results provide baseline information prior to herring depletion and can inform modern management.

Ancient Clam Gardens Increased Shellfish Production: Adaptive Strategies from the Past Can Inform Food Security Today

Maintaining food production while sustaining productive ecosystems is among the central challenges of our time, yet, it has been for millennia. Ancient clam gardens, intertidal rock-walled terraces constructed by humans during the late Holocene, are thought to have improved the growing conditions for clams. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the beach slope, intertidal height, and biomass and density of bivalves at replicate clam garden and non-walled clam beaches in British Columbia, Canada. We also quantified the variation in growth and survival rates of littleneck clams (Leukoma staminea) we experimentally transplanted across these two beach types. We found that clam gardens had significantly shallower slopes than non-walled beaches and greater densities of L. staminea and Saxidomus giganteus, particularly at smaller size classes. Overall, clam gardens contained 4 times as many butter clams and over twice as many littleneck clams relative to non-walled beaches. As predicted, this relationship varied as a function of intertidal height, whereby clam density and biomass tended to be greater in clam gardens compared to non-walled beaches at relatively higher intertidal heights. Transplanted juvenile L. staminea grew 1.7 times faster and smaller size classes were more likely to survive in clam gardens than non-walled beaches, specifically at the top and bottom of beaches. Consequently, we provide strong evidence that ancient clam gardens likely increased clam productivity by altering the slope of soft-sediment beaches, expanding optimal intertidal clam habitat, thereby enhancing growing conditions for clams. These results reveal how ancient shellfish aquaculture practices may have supported food security strategies in the past and provide insight into tools for the conservation, management, and governance of intertidal seascapes today.

Indigenous marine resource management on the Northwest Coast of North America

There is increasing recognition among anthropologists that indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast actively managed their terrestrial and marine resources and ecosystems. Such management practices ensured the ongoing productivity of valued resources and were embedded in a complex web of socio-economic interactions. Using ethnographic and archaeological data, this paper synthesizes the ecological and cultural aspects of marine management systems of coastal First Nations. We divide our discussion into four aspects of traditional management systems: harvesting methods, enhancement strategies, tenure systems, and worldview and social relations. The ethnographic data, including memories of living knowledge holders, tend to provide windows into daily actions and the more intangible aspects of management; the archaeological record provides insights into the more tangible aspects and how management systems developed through time and space. This review demonstrates not only the breadth of Northwest Coast marine management but also the value of integrating different kinds of knowledge and data to more fully document the whole of these ancient management systems.

High Potential for Using DNA from Ancient Herring Bones to Inform Modern Fisheries Management and Conservation

Pacific herring (Clupea pallasi) are an abundant and important component of the coastal ecosystems for the west coast of North America. Current Canadian federal herring management assumes five regional herring populations in British Columbia with a high degree of exchange between units, and few distinct local populations within them. Indigenous traditional knowledge and historic sources, however, suggest that locally adapted, distinct regional herring populations may have been more prevalent in the past. Within the last century, the combined effects of commercial fishing and other anthropogenic factors have resulted in severe declines of herring populations, with contemporary populations potentially reflecting only the remnants of a previously more abundant and genetically diverse metapopulation. Through the analysis of 85 archaeological herring bones, this study attempted to reconstruct the genetic diversity and population structure of ancient herring populations using three different marker systems (mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), microsatellites and SNPs). A high success rate (91%) of DNA recovery was obtained from the extremely small herring bone samples (often <10 mg). The ancient herring mtDNA revealed high haplotype diversity comparable to modern populations, although population discrimination was not possible due to the limited power of the mtDNA marker. Ancient microsatellite diversity was also similar to modern samples, but the data quality was compromised by large allele drop-out and stuttering. In contrast, SNPs were found to have low error rates with no evidence for deviations from Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium, and simulations indicated high power to detect genetic differentiation if loci under selection are used. This study demonstrates that SNPs may be the most effective and feasible approach to survey genetic population structure in ancient remains, and further efforts should be made to screen for high differentiation markers.This study provides the much needed foundation for wider scale studies on temporal genetic variation in herring, with important implications for herring fisheries management, Aboriginal title rights and herring conservation.

“Everything revolves around the herring”: the Heiltsuk–herring relationship through time

Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) is foundational to many social-ecological systems of the North American coast. The indigenous people of Heiltsuk First Nation on the central coast of British Columbia, Canada have depended on this forage fish for food, social, ceremonial, and economic purposes for millennia. Our research documents social, ecological, and cultural aspects of Heiltsuk First Nation’s relationship with Pacific herring and how this relationship has changed over time. We describe and discuss (1) how Heiltsuk social institutions, local and traditional ecological knowledge, and worldview have informed herring management strategies from pre-contact times until present, and (2) how post-contact changes in state-led herring management and other social and institutional developments in British Columbia have affected the role and transmission of Heiltsuk local knowledge and management of herring. By working in close partnership with Heiltsuk decision-makers, and by conducting interviews with Heiltsuk knowledge holders, we ensured that the data gathered would be relevant, applicable, and valuable to the Heiltsuk community. Our research therefore serves as an example of how state fisheries agencies could improve relationships with indigenous communities by engaging in more collaborative data collection, and our results suggest the potential for joint learning and improvement in fisheries management through collaboration during the design of management and harvesting plans. Our research has relevance at the global level because we identify some of the steps that may be taken to help overcome institutionalized inertia and attain more equitable power relationships for sustainable fisheries management.

Between a rock and a soft place: Using optical ages to date ancient clam gardens on the Pacific Northwest

Rock-walled archaeological features are notoriously hard to date, largely because of the absence of suitable organic material for radiocarbon dating. This study demonstrates the efficacy of dating clam garden wall construction using optical dating, and uses optical ages to determine how sedimentation rates in the intertidal zone are affected by clam garden construction. Clam gardens are rock-walled, intertidal terraces that were constructed and maintained by coastal First Nation peoples to increase bivalve habitat and productivity. These features are evidence of ancient shellfish mariculture on the Pacific Northwest and, based on radiocarbon dating, date to at least the late Holocene. Optical dating exploits the luminescence signals of quartz or feldspar minerals to determine the last time the minerals were exposed to sunlight (i.e., their burial age), and thus does not require the presence of organic material. Optical ages were obtained from three clam garden sites on northern Quadra Island, British Columbia, and their reliability was assessed by comparing them to radiocarbon ages derived from shells underneath the clam garden walls, as well as below the terrace sediments. Our optical and radiocarbon ages suggest that construction of these clam garden walls commenced between ~1000 and ~1700 years ago, and our optical ages suggest that construction of the walls was likely incremental and increased sedimentation rates in the intertidal zone by up to fourfold. Results of this study show that when site characteristics are not amenable to radiocarbon dating, optical dating may be the only viable geochronometer. Furthermore, dating rock-walled marine management features and their geomorphic impact can lead to significant advances in our understanding of the intimate relationships that Indigenous peoples worldwide developed with their seascapes.

Ethnobiology and Fisheries: Learning from the Past for the Present

For millennia, peoples around the world have relied on aquatic resources and ecosystems to sustain themselves. For generations, their livelihoods and their cultural identities have been intertwined with the rhythms and cycles of the seas and rivers. Many of these communities developed complex systems of resource management and use that encouraged social and ecological resilience. Their local and traditional ecological knowledge, accumulated through daily interactions with local environments and in the context of community social values, are the foundation of these management systems. Today, changing conditions, such as ocean warming and acidification, overfishing, industrialization, and pollution, coupled with changes in the social and economic contexts in which fisheries are conducted, threaten traditional fisheries and the cultures that have relied on them for generations (e.g., Newell and Ommer 1999; Turner et al. 2013). In some cases, the social and cultural landscapes have been so dramatically altered that these traditional fisheries are barely remembered (e.g., Anderson 2007). However, in many regions, fishing communities are fighting hard to retain their traditional right to fish sustainably in healthy, productive aquatic ecosystems (e.g., Bavinck et al. 2017; Berkes 2015; Jentoft and Chuenpagdee 2015; Ommer and team 2007). For some, this includes working with scientists to document their traditional practices as well as the many environmental changes they observe in their aquatic ecosystems (e.g., Salomon et al. 2011). At the same time, resource managers and social and natural scientists are increasingly aware of the value of the knowledge encompassed within these fishery systems and the dearth of documentation about them. While there is an increasing number of valuable studies of fisheries in the fields of social sciences, natural sciences, and resource management, collaborations among these intellectual communities remain limited, as do true collaborations between academic fisheries scientists and local and Indigenous fishery knowledge holders. Educating fisheries students, Indigenous youth, and the general public

Impacts of Climate Change on Subsistence-Oriented Communities

Subsistence-oriented communities are both front-line observers of climatic change and are particularly vulnerable to these changes. We present some general challenges and threats that these communities are facing with climate change. Impacts on food security and culture are discussed, highlighting some issues that are often ignored in the literature. We also discuss how climate change is related to social justice of subsistence-oriented communities. Our focused exploration of the effects of climate change on First Nations communities in British Columbia provides an example of the intertwined and interconnected social–ecological impacts of climate change on subsistence-oriented people.