Report on the international surveys of herring larvae in the North Sea, 1967- and 1968

A Special Meeting of the Herring Committee of ICES was held in 1966 to consider the effects on the North Sea herring stocks of the large increase in fishing effort following the entry of the Norwegian purseseine fleet into this fishery in 1964. One of the recommendations of this meeting was that the countries concemed in the North Sea herring fisheries should collaborate in an attempt to get better measures of larval abundance in the North Sea as a guide to the relative size of the stocks and of changes in them. A small group of experts was set up to implement this recommendation, consisting of A. C. Burd (England), J. J. Zijlstra (Netherlands), G. Hempel (Germany), S. Haraldsvik (Norway), K. Popp Madsen (Denmark), and A. Saville (Scotland), Convenor. This Group decided that an attempt should be made, starting in 1967, to sample all of the known spawning areas of autunm-spawning herring in the northem and central North Sea and in the Skagerak at the time of the peak of batching in each area and agreed on a sub-division of the area to be sampled between the six countries. The coordination of the programmes of the different countries was carried out by the Convenor of the Group.