THE PROBLEM WITH STRIPED BASS HATCHERIES

 

The recent drought in striped bass recruitment has now reached all four of the major striped bass spawning areas, spanning the past six years in Maryland, the single most important such spawning area on the East Coast, four years in Virginia, at least three years in the Delaware River (2024 data has not yet been released) and two in the Hudson River. 

The impact of that drought is now being felt by anglers, with coastal anglers between Maine and Virginia noting a dearth of smaller fish—say, bass under five pounds or so—while recreational fishermen in the Chesapeake Bay tell me that striped bass fishing is the worst that they’ve experienced in decades.,

With fishing that slow, and concerns for the future of the striped bass stock growing, it was probably inevitable that some anglers would start talking about the possibility of replacing at least some of the missing natural reproduction with fish grown in hatcheries.  And that can seem like an attractive option, a future where striped bass factories located up and down the coast would flood coastal ecosystems with millions upon millions of manufactured rubber fish—a term that I admittedly stole from conservation writer Ted Williams, because it describes hatchery fish so well—to entertain anglers and support commercial fisheries. 

There would be no need for current, restrictive regulations, because if you started running low on striped bass, you could just whip up a few million more, release them into various bays and estuaries, and have numbers back up in just a few years.

It’s basically what western states have done with steelhead and salmon, and more and more southern states are doing with seatrout and red drum.  The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department admits that its hatcheries are

“a tool used…to manage the marine fishery along the Texas coast to ensure that harvest levels are sustained and stocks are replenished,  [emphasis added]”

and Coastal Conservation Association Texas, by far the largest anglers’ rights advocacy group in the state, declared the release of such hatcheries one billionth fingerling a “monumental conservation achievement.”

Yet, despite such declaration, the conservation value of hatcheries is very open to question. 

A 2022 article in Hakai magazine noted that the first salmon hatchery was built in 1872, and that there are now at least 243 salmon hatcheries located between California and Alaska, and more in Russia, Japan, and South Korea, which collectively release over five billion salmon per year into the Pacific Ocean.  Yet, despite 150 years of hatchery operations, wild salmon stocks are still struggling, while hatchery fish cause real damage to wild populations, with streams

“crowded with juvenile wild and hatchery fish, living fin to fin, competing for food, and ripe for disease and parasites…Hatchery fish also diminish the genetic robustness of wild salmon when, later in their lives, they enter spawning grounds and interbreed.”

Hatchery salmon are also expensive, with the Hakai article noting that

“How much a hatchery salmon costs varies per hatchery, but 20 years ago, a researcher calculated that to keep salmon swimming in the Columbia and Snake River basins in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, the price tag was US $400 per fish.”

 None of those things bode well for a hatchery-supported striped bass fishery, should such a thing ever come to pass, yet some people are urging the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission to give striped bass hatcheries serious consideration.  The December 2024 newsletter of the Jersey Coast Anglers Association carries a long column by Tom Fote, a member of the ASMFC’s Striped Bass Advisory Panel, which addresses the striped bass hatchery issue and notes that

“Hatcheries might be the only way to rebuild the stocks.  This will come down to money and I don’t hold out much hope.  But I feel this may be the only way.”

The column was submitted to the ASMFC as one of the written comments intended to inform its Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board of shareholder sentiment ahead of the Board’s December 16, 2024 meeting, and to the extent that the column also advised that

“Unless we begin really addressing the real reasons we are having low recruitment of striped bass in Chesapeake Bay, just more regulations on fishermen will have no positive impact,”

and given that the Management Board decided to take no action to further conserve the striped bass resource in 2025, it might have had its intended effect. 

But so far, no one at the ASMFC is seriously considering striped bass hatcheries, and that’s a good thing, first because they’d be horribly expensive—far too expensive to be a serious option in today’s political environment.  In addition, it’s not clear that they could make a meaningful contribution to the coastal striped bass population; at a December 2024 meeting of New York’s Marine Resources Advisory Council, Martin Gary, Director of the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Marine Division, told the Council that, as a young biologist, he worked at a striped bass hatchery that operated in Maryland during the 1980s and that, even though such hatchery produced a lot of young bass, its production was trivial compared to the number of juvenile bass produced naturally, even in a “mediocre” spawning year.

Finally, striped bass genetics would get in the way, for from a genetic standpoint, a striped bass is not just a striped bass.  There are separate genetic strains, which are particularly suited to specific nursery areas and, in some cases, particular waterways.

North Carolina has learned that the hard way.

For many years, the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries had stocked striped bass into the lower Cape Fear River, in an effort to supplement natural reproduction that has been impaired by pollution, the construction of dams, and the introduction of non-native predators.  However, the stocked fish failed to spawn successfully, and North Carolina biologists think they know why.  Prior to 2010,

“the broodfish used for hatchery production were taken from the Roanoke River.  The introduction of Roanoke River fish (and their genetics) likely led to the replacement of the original wild strain of Cape Fear River Striped Bass.  Environmental conditions in these two North Carolina rivers are quite different.  Additionally, Striped Bass populations south of Cape Hatteras [including that in the Cape Fear River] typically remain in their home rivers and do not migrate to the ocean, whereas older Striped Bass from the Roanoke River system have been documented migrating as far north as the Gulf of Maine.”

It seems to be a classic example of putting the wrong fish in the wrong place, something that happens quite often when hatchery fish are involved.  So, North Carolina fishery managers now plan to use broodstock from South Carolina’s Cooper River.

“The Cooper system in South Carolina is home to the nearest population of river-resident striped bass.  The switch to South Carolina broodstock is intended to help improve genetic diversity and promote natural reproduction by re-introducing Striped Bass that share a similar riverine life history and experience similar river flows and environmental conditions.”

There is no guarantee that the change will successfully create a naturally-reproducing Cape Fear River population of bass, although hopefully that will occur.  However, the problems that North Carolina fishery managers faced in the Cape Fear River emphasize how important regional differences in genetics can be to the striped bass population, and makes it clear that any hatchery program will have to consider genetics should a striped bass stocking program begin anywhere on the coast.

The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources advises that

“In order to ensure responsible stocking of a species, managers must understand how populations are connected in order to identify appropriate management units.  Over time, populations that are isolated from each other will become genetically different through random processes as well as becoming adapted or best suited for a particular habitat.  If two populations, or rivers in the case of striped bass, have little to no migration of individuals occurring between them, stocking fish from one system into another creates an unnatural migration and could be deleterious to unique beneficial adaptations of the stocked system.”

We should note that, although South Carolina seems to be talking about the geographic isolation of different fish populations, what matters from a genetic standpoint is reproductive isolation; various genetic strains of striped bass might share the same summer feeding grounds, but so long as they spawn in distinctly different areas, they will still be genetically isolated.

South Carolina also informs us that

“Even if fish are stocked into their own system, it is preferable to capture a large number of new broodstock from the wild every year as opposed to maintaining the same broodstock and their offspring over multiple years.  The longer fish are held in captivity, the greater the risk of artificial selection in individuals who survive captivity, which may negatively affect survivability in the wild.  Additionally, if too many few broodstock are used there will not be much diversity in the system since most fish will belong to just a few parents.  Genetic diversity (i.e., genetic health) can be thought of as a toolbox a population has—the more tools in the toolbox the more problems a repairman can fix; similarly, the higher the diversity of a population the more stressors or problems the population can withstand (such as higher summer temperatures the state is experiencing).

While the foregoing comments were specifically intended to address the needs of non-migratory striped bass that reside in southeastern river systems, they are equally applicable to any hatchery program that might be created to augment the migratory population that spawns in the Chesapeake Bay and in the Delaware and Hudson rivers, as those fish also exhibit region-specific genetic adaptations.

About five years ago, the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries released the results of a genetic study that examined the genetic signatures of striped bass sampled between Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence and North Carolina’s Cape Fear River.  The study revealed six genetically distinct groups of striped bass.  Three were unique to Canada; the study distinguished between groups of bass in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, New Brunswick’s St. John’s River, and Shubenacadie River in Nova Scotia.

Three distinct groups were also identified along the United States’ East Coast.  One consisted of fish originating in New York’s Hudson River; the same genetic signature occurred in fish from Maine’s Kennebec River, which was stocked with Hudson River fish during the 1980s.  One consisted of fish from both the Chesapeake Bay and the Delaware River.  Ben Gehagen, a Massachusetts biologist, explained that seemingly surprising finding by noting that

“In several tagging studies we’ve observed adult striped bass migrating between upper Chesapeake Bay and the head of Delaware Bay using the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, which was constructed in the early 1800s.  Before the canal was built, fish from each of these estuaries may well have been genetically distinct.  Alternatively, the Chesapeake Bay population may have contributed to the recovery of the Delaware Bay population after the latter collapsed decades ago.”

The third genetic group on the U.S. East Coast consisted of fish from North Carolina’s Roanoke and Cape Fear Rivers; in this case, the stocking of fish from the Roanoke River into the Cape Fear explains why the genetic signatures in bass from the two very different waterways would be the same.

Any striped bass hatchery program would have to keep fish from those three groups separate, or risk introducing bass into the ecosystem that were less genetically fit to survive and reproduce than the natural population.

And even that level of separation might not be enough.  An article in On the Water magazine that discussed the Massachusetts study noted that

“within each of these [genetically distinct] populations, there is likely far finer-scale structuring down to the level of individual tributaries; indeed, the team found some differentiation between fish sampled from eastern and western Chesapeake Bay.”

Although such distinctions are very small and very difficult to determine, and could be masked if just a few individuals from one Chesapeake tributary drifted into and spawned in another, it’s impossible to say whether they might make a significant difference in a bass’ spawning success in one tributary over another.  The question might well depend on whether any fine-scale genetic differences were the result of reproductive isolation and random genetic drift, or whether they represented adaptation to the prevailing conditions in a particular waterway.

Thus, to avoid doing harm while making a meaningful, positive difference in the striped bass fishery, any hatchery program would, first, have to be very large, in order to provide the number of one-year-old (the age at which bass are deemed to recruit into the population) bass needed to substitute for lost natural reproduction.  To do that, without causing long-term genetic harm to the striped bass stock, such hatcheries would have to remove large numbers of broodstock from the population each year, while at the same time assuring that whatever broodstock are taken share the same genetic signatures, not only with respect to the three broad genetic groups, but perhaps down to genetic markers shared only by bass that reproduce in a single river.

Any such hatchery program would, necessarily, be very expensive.  It’s not clear where the funding would come from, as the states are financially strapped, Congress wants to reduce federal spending, and with anglers in New York and New Jersey, at least, unwilling to spend even a trivial amount on a saltwater fishing license, it’s hard to believe that many recreational fishermen would be willing to support a striped bass stamp or similar mechanism that might cost 25, 35, or perhaps 50 dollars or more to build, and then maintain, the hatchery infrastructure.

And hatchery operations would, in themselves, be expensive.  Beyond the cost of breeding the adult fish and growing out fingerling bass until they reached a size likely to survive in the wild, the hatchery would have to engage in an annual effort to obtain fresh broodstock, along with ongoing genetic analysis of such broodstock, to assure that the hatchery wasn’t mixing strains and creating bass less fit to survive in the wild.  And that doesn’t count the ongoing costs of feeding and maintaining the health of the fish as they develop from eggs into fingerlings large enough to release.

In theory, that is all possible, but getting a hatchery program right would take a level of funding and effort that goes far beyond the effort and costs needed to properly manage striped bass by traditional means.  And knowing how government works, it’s all too easy to believe that, even if a hatchery program got off on the right foot, it wouldn’t take long before politicians began cutting corners in the name of “efficiency” and “cost reduction,” so that eventually the striped bass fishery, like that for Pacific salmon, would be dominated by genetically mixed hatchery fish, while native runs languished and perhaps—again like 28 populations of wild salmon and steelhead trout—even earning a listing pursuant to the Endangered Species Act.

Striped bass hatcheries, in the end, would be just lead to new problems, and not to answers.

We already have a wild, reproducing striped bass stock.

The only answer that we need is a good, precautionary management program that will restore it to health, and then ensure that it survives.