Marine Science Career Profiles

Jake Schweigert is a herring biologist with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans' (DFO) Pacific Biological Station in Nanaimo, BC. His work focuses on herring stock assessment and management, as highlighted in the Herring Environmental Indicator Bulletin. OceanLink spoke with Mr. Schweigert in his office overlooking Departure Bay.

Could you please give me some background about what you do here at the Station?

I'm responsible for the Herring Dynamics Program, which involves coordinating all the research programs conducted on herring by the Biological Station, as well as the annual collection of data which we use to do assessments of herring abundance each year. I am also responsible for developing and improving stock assessment models which are used to estimate herring abundance and forecast their numbers for the uncoming fishing season. Each year we produce a big report on herring stock abundance that is reviewed by PSARC (Pacific Stock Assessment ReviewCommittee) and forms the basis of the scientific advice used in setting fishing quotas for herring each year. We also provide advice to other parts of the Department, the fishing industry, the native groups, and various other client groups, about what herring run sizes are going to be and just about basic biology. Through the Herring Industry Advisory Board a series of meetings and discussions with various stakeholder groups occurs to formulate fishing plans for the coming year. We providescientific input and advice to this process. This represents a big part of the job. Much of the rest of the job involves dealing with administration for the program, keeping up with recent scientific developments on herring, stock assessment, and other areas of biology. We also meet with various other public groups and provide basic biological information onherring, the fishery and how it is managed. If possible, I also try to attend a couple of workshops or conferences in my area of expertise each year.

How is the data collected?

During the past few years DFO has moved into partnerships with fishing industry groups. We have developed a partnership with the Herring Conservation and Research Society to conduct the herring charter program or test fishing program for us. The Society contracts commercial fisherman to collect biological samples of herring, and to monitor roe quality in preparation for the fishery. We also try to get some DFO people out there to work with them. The biological samples provide data on the length, weight, sex, and age of the fish in each area.

We also contract fishermen to do assessments of the herring spawn or egg deposition throughout the coast. They hire divers to go around the entire B.C. coast and measure the length and width of all the herring spawning beds and estimate how many eggs are in them. Because we know the fecundity of the female herring we can use these data to work backwards to determine how many fish there must have been to produce all those eggs.

We also conduct other smaller research projects to address specific scientific questions. One of these has focussed on determining the distribution and abundance of of young herring in their first summer as a predictor of how abundant they will be at age 3 when they first contribute to the fishery.

Do you personally get out into the field to do this sort of work?

The majority of my time is spent behind my computer terminal! But I always try to get out during the herring fishery on a test boat for a couple of weeks. In the early 1980s when we were developing the scientific basis for the sampling design for conducting spawn abundance surveys I probably spent a month in the field each spring during the time when herring were spawning, doing diving, processing samples, and running around in a speedboat and looking at herring spawn. It was great!

What's the actual title for your job, are you a research scientist...?

My official title is Head, Herring Dynamics Program, but I am classified as a biologist. The federal government has job descriptions for each position which is classified against a set of standards that determines at what level the position is rated. The rating determines the rate of pay for the position. A research scientist is a specific classification within the federal system and is usually somebody who has a Ph.D., so they have six or eight years of university following a basic Bachelor of Science degree. I guess the big difference between a biologist and a research scientist is that they tend to have a broader scope to their work, whereas biologists are more focused in what they do although they can both do scientific research. In fact, the federal government is currently moving towards a universal classification system where you wouldn't be a scientist or biologist but rather be in the same group but at different levels depending on what kind of work you do and what sort of responsibilities you have.

Did you always want to be a fisheries biologist?

Not specifically a fisheries biologist. I knew I wanted to work in a job where I could spend time outside, and I wanted to work in some area of resource management. I've always been an avid sports fisherman, so it seemed like a good direction to go in.

How did you pursue your career?

I spent a lot of time talking to people about what I though I wanted to do and what was required to do it. Its a bizarre thing actually, my mother claims that when I was about 12 years old I wrote a letter to the Director of the Pacific Biological Station asking how I could get a job here! I never really thought about a career much until first or second year university, when you're trying to decide what courses you want to take and what kind of job you want to end up with. I spent quite a bit of time going around to different professors at university and asking them what courses I should take if I wanted to get into this or that field. And I spent a couple of summers doing volunteer work at the Royal Ontario Museum in the Ichthyology Department, learning a little bit about what goes on there. Then I tried to get some summer jobs that were in the biology area. I spent one summer working for the Ministry of Natural Resources doing lake surveys in northern Ontario. After I graduated I had a couple of short term jobs in fisheries.

What do you enjoy most about your job here at the Station?

Because we are a research institution there's a lot of freedom to pursue interesting scientific questions. I think that's why a lot of people go into research, there are always questions that you want to answer and things that you want to look at and try to figure out why they work the way they do. So that's the fun part of the job. I also like playing with numbers and computers, so stock assessment is sort of a natural thing to do. If you don't want to be an accountant, a population modeler or a statistician is probably the next best thing.

You must use a lot of statistics and mathematics.

A fair amount. I don't have that much formal training, a lot of it I picked up along the way, which is probably not the best way to do it! I suspect that requirements at universities have changed a bit in recent years so that students going into ecology and population biology need more training in mathematics. Over the past decade, population models for fisheries have become much more analytically complex which makes a good background in this area critical to be successful in the job.

What do you dislike the most about your job?

I guess with any of these jobs there's a fair amount of bureaucracy and administrative things that you have to deal with, and it seems to be increasing over time as budgets decline more of this work is downloaded to professional staff who have less time to do what they are really good at. The other thing I don't particularly enjoy is having to deal with a lot of conflict with user groups, but I don't think there's any way around that. Many of the problems are related to allocation of the resource, rather than how many fish we estimate are out there. Its really a question of who gets them. It shouldn't be a science problem, but science often seems to get dragged into providing scientific justification for allocation decisions.

Do you have any advice for young people interested in getting into fisheries science?

I think the best thing to do is to try to get some experience in some aspect of it. If you want to volunteer there are probably lots of opportunities to spend a couple of days in different areas and get a feel for what you like and what you don't like, so that you can focus in on what area you want to go into. And then, try and get into a co-operative education program or some sort of summer job in one area that looks like it might be interesting for you and find out whether it is.

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