Maria Abate (center) and two BU students, Chelseigh Bond (left) and Abigail Skena, wade into Squibnocket Herring Run in an effort to help track the river herring population. Photo by Andrew Karlinsky, Wampanoag Environmental Lab

Conservation

River Herring in Martha’s Vineyard Are Disappearing. A BU Marine Biologist Is Trying to Help Save Them

Maria Abate and her students are working with the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) on Martha’s Vineyard to track—and protect—the dwindling migratory river herring population

Every spring, the island of Noepe, now known as Martha’s Vineyard, receives thousands of visitors: not just sunny-weather tourists, but also 10- to 12-inch-long, silver-scaled river herring. 

These migratory fish swim to Menemsha Pond on the southwestern side of the island, where they funnel into a small creek, called Squibnocket Herring Run, which leads to another adjoining brackish pond, called Squibnocket Pond. Together, the ponds and the creek serve as critical habitats for river herring—primarily alewives—who are born in the ponds, swim out to sea, and return when it’s time to spawn.

But year after year, what used to be a roaring highway of river herring has declined to a slow trickle. 

“It’s terrible,” says Maria Abate, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences adjunct assistant professor in the Marine Program and a research marine biologist for the Natural Resources Department of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah). Little is known about what these fish do when they’re in the ocean, but their annual returns to Squibnocket Herring Run are well-known and observed by Aquinnah Wampanoag, who have inhabited the island for over 10,000 years. The creek, the ponds, and 477 acres of land belong to the Aquinnah Wampanoag and are managed by the Tribal Natural Resources Department. 

As a marine biologist and fish expert, Abate tracks the river herring populations in collaboration with her colleagues, and two BU undergraduate students, Chelseigh Bond (CAS’26) and Abigail Skena (CAS’25). Last year brought the lowest number of herring ever documented in the creek, with 12,000 fish counted—compared to about 37,000 every spring from 2018 to 2020. This year, the count was even more concerning: as of early June, Abate confirmed that there were still record low numbers, with 40 percent less herring recorded than in 2023. 

“The numbers are extremely worrisome,” Abate says. “It does not look like this year will reverse the downward trend that we’ve been seeing for the past five years.” 

The Herring creek isn’t alone in welcoming less fish. According to NOAA Fisheries, the river herring’s disappearance along the Atlantic coast is a symptom of larger problems, like climate change, overfishing, and habitat depletion. Catching river herring anywhere in Massachusetts is already prohibited by the state, but they are often caught in large trawling nets by commercial vessels fishing for Atlantic herring—a larger type of herring that spends its whole life in the ocean. Abate says that river herring and Atlantic herring are known to swim together in massive schools. Even though there are limits on how many pounds of Atlantic herring can be caught in federal waters, the tribe maintains that too many river herring are caught as collateral, called bycatch, while migrating through Long Island and Block Island Sounds to their natal ponds. 

“It’s been 25 years since the state’s moratorium made it unlawful to harvest river herring from Massachusetts runs, yet the commercial trawlers can take them as bycatch by the metric ton off our shores,” says Andrew Jacobs, laboratory manager and environmental technician at the Natural Resources Department of the Aquinnah Wampanoag. Tracking the fish and amassing clear data that demonstrates the need for further conservation regulations is crucial—and that’s exactly what Abate and her students are there to do.

“Recognizing that their river herring population continued to decline under the state’s moratorium, the tribe initiated a monitoring program to get in front of the problem,” Jacobs says. 

The tribe has been actively monitoring the fish population for decades and, in 2016, installed the first “herring cam” in the creek. They also started tagging fish with PIT tags—Passive Integrated Transponders that are about one inch long—to track how many individual fish are returning to the ponds each year. Abate’s efforts, with the help of students like Bond and Skena, have been instrumental in making sure the detection tools are collecting data to document the fine-scale local movements of the fish accurately. 

“I was attracted by the community aspect, and that this work has direct management applications,” Skena says. “As an undergraduate, this was a chance to contribute to research directly for tribal communities.” 

She and Bond have worked on-site at the tribe’s Environmental Laboratory, and waded into the creek during site visits to see the herring run firsthand. For the past year, Skena has watched the camera recordings of the river herring and their predators, the striped bass, to sort and collect the data to make it usable for the tribe’s Natural Resources Department—a time-intensive task, she says. The data has been used to count the striped bass coming in and out to feed on the herring, adding a new layer of knowledge to the ecosystem. 

“This is a fairly new predator-prey dynamic in the creek, because in the past there were so many herring that there was security in numbers,” says Skena, who helped parse through the specialized detection software to analyze the footage. 

Bond has also been writing code to elucidate the movements of individual herring as they swim up and downstream. With the PIT tags, the antennas along the creek capture their movements and record the tag in a massive data log. The data documented the individuals who managed to come back year after year, and helped answer some important questions: How large are the fish who avoided predation and completed their journey out of the creek? Do individual herring modify their movements to avoid predation in the creek? Can any of the tagged fish stay out of the bycatch of commercial trawlers and return to the creek to spawn another year?

Against the odds, Abate confirmed that some fish recorded in the creek in 2023 returned again in 2024—a bit of good news despite the overall downward trend for the herring run. 

In addition to the substantial economic and sustenance losses, “the herring have strong cultural meanings for the Aquinnah Wampanoag Tribe,” Abate says. “And the original idea of the herring cam was to not take more from nature than nature can provide. By merging the tribe’s technical fishery tools, like the herring cam video and PIT tag technology, with classical Western foraging theory, we aim to better understand the level of predation pressure in the creek.” 

Abate and her colleagues would like to see stronger offshore protections for river herring, since their power is limited to the island. The New England Fishery Management Council passed motions in June 2024 calling for future research and stronger recommendations to improve catch estimates of river herring, a small but encouraging step forward. Abate is also hopeful that a recent reduction in Atlantic herring quotas will reduce the river herring bycatch. The area of water where the Aquinnah river herring migrate remains open to Atlantic herring fishing boats, Abate says, but if it were closed, they could possibly see a rebound in the river herring’s abundance. 

“We’re trying to put pressure on regulators to control the offshore aspect of the river herring management needs,” Abate says. In the meantime, she and her students will continue monitoring the population dynamics and changes over the seasons. The information that she, her team, and local experts are collecting provides evidence that the delicate life cycle of the river herring—who navigate the vast sea to the tiny ponds of the island—is hanging in the balance.