A Closer View!

Those little, 1mm in diameter, spheres are the fertilized Pacific Herring eggs. These eggs were up to 8mm deep on this beach. So, billions and billions of eggs have been washed up.

comments (3)

Ferdy Christant

Lion

I've never seen anything like this, thanks for capturing and explaining it. The numbers are staggering! Posted one year ago
1. gary fast
  
  Lion
  
  Yes, it’s the first time we have seen it. Some say it hasn’t happened this way for at least fifty years. It was just on the southern end of the island but on both sides. Someone mentioned that all these eggs are the unfertilized ones. The wind has pick them up and blown them to shore. The survival rate to juvenile herring is one in ten thousand eggs! Each female lays around 20,000 eggs. Posted one year ago
2. 1. Ferdy Christant
    
    Lion
    
    Thanks for the extra explanation. Hopefully the unfertilized ones are a usual meal to several creatures. Posted one year ago

The Pacific herring

The Pacific herring is a species of the herring family associated with the Pacific Ocean environment of North America and northeast Asia. It is a silvery fish with unspined fins and a deeply forked caudal fin. The distribution is widely along the California coast from Baja California north to Alaska and the Bering Sea; in Asia the distribution is south to Japan, Korea, and China.

Info 2 0

Similar species: Herrings

Species identified by gary fast