Earth Almanac: March/April 2002

Return of the Striper

Fresh from the icy Atlantic, silver fish clad in the black pinstripes of football referees (but blessed with better eyesight) are pouring into the Hudson, the Delaware, and the rivers of Chesapeake Bay to spawn in fresh water. The striped bass, a.k.a. "striper," is capable of attaining weights of more than 100 pounds. Ten to 50 males orbit the larger female, churning the surface and racing over her on their sides, as if wounded. A 4-pound female can produce 426,000 eggs; a 55-pounder, 4.2 million. Stripers, which range naturally from New Brunswick to Florida and west to Louisiana, have been introduced on the Pacific Coast and in freshwater rivers and impoundments around the nation. Recent fluctuations in the native Atlantic population illustrate what waggish conservationists have called "the First Maxim of Fisheries Management"--that is, we don't start managing a stock until we wipe it out. In the late 1970s Atlantic stripers crashed, due largely to overfishing, but in 1984 Congress relieved the torpid states of management authority and awarded it to the Feds. Today, after 18 years of strict bag limits, the stock has rebounded.

Beaks by Barnum & Bailey

When kelp-maned granite sheds its frozen crust, Atlantic puffins pause from their ocean wanderings. From Labrador to Maine and from Greenland and northern Russia to the Brittany coast, these cousins of the extinct great auk march stiffly onto rocky islands, the massive parrotlike beaks of both sexes aglow with impossible shades and sequences of blue, orange, and yellow. In 1925 ornithologist Edwin Howe Forbush described the puffin as "a solemnly comical Mr. Punch among birds" that speaks in "deep, sepulchral tones full of the deepest feeling and capable of harsh croakings." Puffins emerge from the sea with fish draped neatly from their beaks like socks from a clothesline. It seems as if someone with fingers had to have helped with the arrangement, but the bird's raspy tongue holds each fish against spines on its palate so it can open its beak and grab another. In flight, puffins resemble badly thrown footballs; when they hit the water they keep "flying," propelled by short, powerful wings to depths of at least 80 feet.