Striper Signals

There is abundant evidence that the Atlantic population of striped bass is crashing. But why should you listen to me, when I and virtually all my fellow striper advocates who aren’t fish managers have been saying this for five years? And why should you listen to us when the trained professionals hired to tend the resource promise that everything is fine and dandy and when all we anglers can offer is anecdotal info—the most unreliable of all evidence, “barroom biology” as it has been called?

Before I answer those questions, here’s another: Why should you listen to the managers who, relying on what they called “scientific evidence,” ran stripers to commercial extinction less than three decades ago, all the while assuring us that everything was fine and dandy? Finally, in 1984, Congress intervened with the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act, a law requiring the Secretary of Commerce to impose a moratorium on striper fishing in any East Coast state not in compliance with a management plan hatched by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), representing coastal states from Maine to North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and the District of Columbia.

Because they were on a congressionally mandated rescue mission and, more importantly, because they had the help of sportfishermen who forced moratoriums, ASMFC managers did better. Rocket science it wasn’t. Suddenly stripers had a chance to grow up and spawn, and the population rebounded spectacularly. But the ongoing media mantra that this was a “triumph” of fisheries management is like lauding a pilot for executing a perfect belly landing after he’d forgotten to deploy the landing gear.

Now the slaughter is on again, dwarfing anything we saw in the 1970s; and when it comes to mindsets, even a taxonomist can’t tell a state manager from an ASMFC manager. Both see fish as swimming wheat to be reaped at so-called “maximum sustainable yield.” Managing for abundance and healthy size and age structure instead of dead-on-the-dock protein has never occurred to them.

Let’s get back to the apparent striper crash. First, fish crashes generated by professional fisheries managers take a good deal longer to manifest than five years, as we saw with the cod crash, the haddock crash, the white-marlin crash, the swordfish crash, the tuna crash, the grouper crash, the snapper crash, the snook crash, the redfish crash, the weakfish crash, the winter-flounder crash, the fluke crash, the southern-flounder crash, the Atlantic-salmon crash, the Pacific-salmon crash, the steelhead crash, the river-herring crash, the menhaden crash, and the first striper crash, to mention just a few. Second, the more anecdotal evidence of fish-stock decline that piles up, the more believable it gets.

At this writing, the statistics for the recreational striper catch in 2008 are considered preliminary, but the numbers are appalling. Coastwide, anglers landed (that is, released or killed) 14,107,835 fish, the worst year since 2000. Along the Atlantic coast, some guides had to cancel their seasons. Maine was down from 1,004,780 fish in 2000 to 518,988 in 2008; New Hampshire from 213,868 to 91,433; Massachusetts from 7,563,326 to 4,001,795; Virginia from 1,357,299 to 647,542; North Carolina from 293,080 to 136,699. In a commercial fishery, the value of fish increases as they get harder to catch, so you may see more fish caught as a stock declines. Recreational landings, on the other hand, tend to follow stock abundance; and, in fact, stock assessments are based on recreational landings.

The managers explain the dreadful fishing with anecdotal evidence of their own, claiming the stripers were just everywhere anglers weren’t. One—a decent, competent man and a fine scientist—told me this: “Reports were that the fish were offshore in New York and New Jersey. Supposedly the water temperature was a bit below average [keeping them south]; and they had record recreational catches down there.” But the preliminary recreational stats (which I don’t believe he had seen) reveal no such thing.

Each year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service coordinates a cooperative trawling expedition for wintering striped bass off North Carolina. This is not a population survey; it is strictly a tagging operation. Still, it’s a good indicator of abundance. Since 1990 the best catch was 6,275 fish in the year 2000; the worst was 147 in 2009. The average from 1987 to 2006 was 2,212, but the average for the last three years was 516.

Even if the anecdotal evidence that the fish are just hanging out elsewhere is accurate, something is terribly amiss—most likely a lack of food in their historic range. Grossly malnourished bass showing up in ever increasing numbers, especially in Chesapeake Bay, which produces 75 percent of the coastal population, would seem to confirm this.