Striper Recovery: Not

Strict one- or two-fish bag limits are meaningless under that kind of pressure. So, for the last seven years, we've been killing about all the fish as soon as they hit legal size. Legal size varies from state to state and sometimes from month to month, but it's usually around 28 inches, except in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina where it's usually around 18 inches. "Since Amendment V we've seen the population trajectory flatten out," says John Carmichael, a North Carolina state fisheries biologist who serves on ASMFC's Striped Bass Stock Assessment Subcommittee. "But there seems to be plenty of spawning stock out there to maintain the population. We're getting good year classes, a lot of recruits coming in. The question now comes down to what do we want to get out of the population. Is the goal to just get a lot of fish, which is what we're producing right now, or do you want to also get bigger, older fish? If it's the latter, then of course you have to fish them less."

Gary Shepherd, the National Marine Fisheries Commission's rep on ASMFC's Striped Bass Technical Committee, agrees with Carmichael. "In terms of total number of eggs, the spawning stock is now probably as large as it's ever been," he told me. "But the big fish are getting cropped off. Most of them are gone by the age of about 15, and stripers can live to 30. So we're limiting their life span to about half."

That raises a disturbing question: Can a population with a grossly skewed individual size- and age-structure--in which virtually all individuals are removed before they have attained more than 50 percent of their age and growth potential--be said to be "recovered"? I submit that the answer is no. When a species evolves the capacity to spawn 15 or 20 times in a lifetime, there are good reasons for it even if we don't understand them. One of those reasons might be a hedge against natural catastrophes and resultant spawning failures, always a danger with anadromous fish and particularly with stripers, which are famous for largely missing year classes. But under present management they spawn once, and that's the end of them.

What's more, some biologists believe there's evidence of genetic selection for slow-growing and small fish. The larger fish also produce more eggs, so chances that the large-fish gene will be passed on to the population are nil under present management. Shepherd isn't sure if the biologists have it right about genetic selection. "Probably the only way to find out if they're right is to not fish on striped bass for 20 years," he says. "And if hundred pounders start showing up again, they're wrong. But you're not going to do that experiment."

In 1999 commercial landings of striped bass totaled 1,103,812 fish, recreational landings 1,328,665 fish. But those stats are deceiving. For one thing, managers estimate that anglers caught an additional 12,514,721 fish that they released. For another, although commercial fishermen take just under half the fish, they are outnumbered by anglers by a factor of something like 500 to one. In my home state of Massachusetts, for example, there were 1,711 commercial striper fishermen on the water in 2000. In 1996, the most recent year for which data is available, the US Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that 886,000 anglers fished for stripers in Massachusetts.

Commercial striper fishermen take far fewer fish in the Northeast than they do in Virginia and Maryland. In 2000, commercials in Massachusetts harvested 40,256 fish weighing 779,736 pounds as compared with an estimated 175,533 fish weighing 2.5-million pounds by anglers. Commercial striper fishing in Massachusetts is relatively clean because it's all hook-and-line. On the other hand, it takes out the most valuable brood stock--fish over 34 inches, of which 98.4 percent are females. Scarcely anyone depends on stripers for income, and a lot of the people involved are recreational anglers paying for their gasoline. You send in your $95, and you can start bashing. It's the same, or worse, in Rhode Island, New York and North Carolina. In Delaware, Maryland and Virginia--where a few people do depend on stripers--annual commercial quotas are, respectively: 193,447 pounds, 2,439,550 pounds and 1,701,748 pounds. And commercial fishermen from Maryland and Virginia who operate on the Potomac get to kill an additional 883,850 pounds.

The reason so few commercial fishermen can take so many fish, the reason we have reckless management like Amendment V and the reason gamefish status for striped bass gets shouted down everywhere outside New Jersey is that no one knows who the recreational fishermen are. They have a few effective organizations such as Coastal Conservation Associations and the Recreational Fishing Alliance but basically, sport anglers--whether they use bait, hardware or flies--are nonentities, political eunuchs. If they were required to purchase a saltwater fishing license--perhaps one for all 15 ASMFC states--there would be a record of their names, phone numbers and addresses and they could be organized to influence managers and politicians. But instead, they rail against the expense. To save the cost of one streamer fly or one surface popper anglers are willing to squander the health of the Atlantic Coast striper stock. It's hard to work up much sympathy for them or to get very angry at ASMFC for kowtowing to powerful, articulate, well-organized commercial fishermen. Anglers have no right to vent their spleens about the commercial slaughter if they don't try to limit their own kill, which is even larger. The "harvest" is bad enough, but it gets lots worse when you figure in needless mortality of the "discards," as the managers call released fish.

North of Boston, where Ipswich Bay collects the Merrimack River, I never fail to encounter a procession of dead and dying striped bass floating in or out on the tide. Source: bait anglers releasing shorts as they wait for their one 28-incher. Only a tiny fraction of the damaged discards ever show on the surface, reports Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries director Paul Diodati, and he has counted as many as 100 floaters on one tide. Using artificial plugs and single hooks baited with sand eels and sea worms, Diodati and his colleagues conducted a striper-hooking mortality study in a five-acre saltwater impoundment. They reported a 26 percent death-rate for single baited hooks and an overall death-rate of nine percent. Diodati's agency estimates that in 2000 Massachusetts anglers released seven million stripers, 571,000 of which died. Coastwide, recreational hooking mortality was estimated by ASMFC to be 1,031,454 fish.

A minimum size limit, at least where bait fishing is allowed, is stupid and wasteful. That's not to say that a maximum size limit--by which anglers have to release, say, fish bigger than 25 inches--is without dangers. It runs the risk of increasing harvest (because small fish are more vulnerable to angling) and thereby creating even more meat fishermen than already exist. But, with proper safeguards such as seasons, a maximum size limit could drastically limit hooking mortality because meat fishermen would get their fish and go home. Although Maine, Connecticut and New Jersey have figured this out, they can't stand the idea of not killing the big female breeders. In Maine you can kill one fish between 20 and 26 inches or one over 40; in Connecticut it's one between 24 and 32 inches and one over 41; and in New Jersey it's one between 24 and 28 inches and one over 28. "A slot limit is very appealing when there's a big group of fish moving through the fishery in that slot size," remarks the Striped Bass Technical Committee's Gary Shepherd. "But the trick is to keep it fixed. And if there's a poor group of fish, you have to stick with that too, take the good with the bad."

Rip Cunningham, editor of Salt Water Sportsman magazine, has crunched some numbers for his state of Massachusetts, but the general idea applies coastwide. "Assume a slot limit 24-28 inches," he says. "In Massachusetts we are currently releasing 2,230,049 fish of this size each season. With [at least] eight percent mortality, 178,400 of them die. We're also taking 175,533 fish over 28 inches. So, with that slot limit, you could take 354,000 fish without any additional impact to the stock. If you had 23-28-inch slot limit, it goes up to over 400,000 fish; with a 22-28-inch slot limit it goes up to 450,000. You'd be doing nothing you aren't doing today except allowing people to take home a fish."