“Where have all the Stripers Gone?”
The most important game fish in local waters is in deep trouble. The writer, a renowned fisherman and longtime conservation columnist for Salt Water Sportsman, thinks he knows why. BY RIP CUNNINGHAM
EXCERPT:
“Scuttlebutt and bad news have the tendency to travel faster than good news or the real facts. That’s human nature and nowhere is it truer than around the docks, where all anglers become possessive about their favorite quarry. When something changes for striped bass, New England’s premier sport fish, and that change is perceived to be bad news, you can be sure the sky will soon be predicted to fall.
As this is being written, there is a sense that “the sky is falling.” Stripers are anadromous fish, meaning they breed in fresh water and live most of their mature lives in salt water. The fish we see around the Cape and Islands spawn in the Chesapeake Bay, and to a much lesser extent in the Hudson River, and migrate up the coast to Maine and beyond. At one time there may have been small local populations that bred in New England rivers, but industrial development extirpated virtually all of those stocks. Stripers can live to thirty years; the largest on record was a 125-pound female caught off North Carolina in 1891. On the Island, the largest fish entered in the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby was a sixty-pound lunker caught by Dick Hathaway in 1978, though there is anecdotal evidence of larger fish that were not entered.
For many on the Vineyard and around the Northeast, the spring arrival of stripers is nothing short of a religious experience, and when something happens to delay or change that experience the news impacts the entire year’s fishing season. Perception soon becomes reality.Bad news is jet fuel for the internet, and by mid-summer alarmed anglers on the waterfront and the internet are howling: “Where are the fish? They haven’t arrived here yet.” “Is the population crashing?” “There aren’t any big fish.” “There aren’t any small fish!” “There aren’t any freaking fish at all!”
All of this is happening with striped bass now, at a time when some thought we might have turned a corner and headed in a sustainable direction. Overfishing and poor environmental conditions led to the collapse of the fishery in the 1980s, but through intensive management by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission the stocks began to rebound. Some states implemented moratoria on striper fishing; Massachusetts was not one of them, but between 1985 and 1993 the derby did its part by not including bass in the tournament. By 1995, the striper population was considered to be fully restored.
So what is the problem today? Or more accurately, what are the problems? Not surprisingly for a migratory fish that relies on both rivers and the ocean and is fished by both commercial and recreational anglers, there are multiple factors involved. And as is often the case for an environmental issue, one’s opinion on which factor plays the largest role often depends on one’s particular perspective and bias. We all see things through our own eyes. The factors include, but are not limited to, several years of poor spawning success, too much fishing pressure on mature – eight-years-old and up – fish, and habitat and forage issues…”
