STRIPED BASS: WHAT MIGHT THE FUTURE HOLD?

 

This winter has, in many respects, been the winter of striped bass speculation.

On one hand, there is real concern for the health of the striped bass stock.  Anglers have been watching the numbers decline for a few years now, have noticed the dearth of smaller fish, and are beginning to worry that the bottom is going to fall out of the fishery in the next couple of years.

It has been a very long time—perhaps not since 1995, when the striped bass stock was first declared rebuilt, and managers here in New York proposed relaxing the regulations from a 1-fish bag and 36-inch minimum size to 2 fish at 28 inches—that I have heard as much anger focused on fisheries managers as I hear today, after the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board chose to take no meaningful action last December, and so allowed the 2018 year class—the last above-average year class in the population—to enter the coastal slot limit this year, to become the focus of the entire catch-and-kill coastal fishery, without giving it any additional protections.

I know some people, who have been involved with the fishery for a very long time who, after listening to the February Management Board meeting and hearing some Board members seemingly try to liberalize management measures and increase the striped bass kill, at least for their favored sectors, instead of restricting everyone’s landings and promoting conservation, are now saying things like “It’s over.  The striped bass are done,” because they have lost any hope that the Management Board will find the will or the courage to take decisive measures to conserve and rebuild the stock.  Such folks fully believe that the Board is going to let the stock languish well below the spawning stock biomass target, because doing anything else would be too politically fraught in their home states.

At the same time, I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen the average bass angler’s faith in fisheries science fall so low; it is very hard for most to believe that the spawning stock biomass is really increasing—even though all available data indicates that it is—when they see little but empty water through much of the season.  They often fail to understand that spawning stock biomass, measured in pounds or in metric tons, can increase for a while even as overall numbers fall, because older fish are growing larger and offsetting the lack of new recruits.

Yet it has also been a winter of undue optimism.  While many anglers worry about what they see as a declining stock, others feel that everything is OK.

That’s particularly true of those who caught their striped bass in the fall, somewhere between western Long Island and northern New Jersey, where anglers experienced what might have been some of the best striped bass fishing of their lives.  When most of the bass that spent their summer somewhere between Maine and Montauk move south along the coast, run into big schools of sand eels and menhaden, and decide to stick around for a while, that sort of fishing is going to happen.  Bass are concentrated, and very catchable.  But in many other places, where the fish should have been, they just were not there.

Others, who have some understanding of what might lead to a successful Chesapeake spawn, point to the relatively cold and snowy winter that we’re experiencing, and hope that it will turn things around.  And it is very possible that we will see the juvenile abundance indices in Maryland and Virginia jump this year.  Cold winters followed by cool, wet springs tend to favor striped bass reproduction, so there is reason to believe that the 2025 year class might, at worst, be the best since 2018.

I certainly hope that’s the case, but we need to remember that water temperatures and water flows aren’t the sole arbiters of spawning success.  Even if there’s a strong spawn, those juvenile bass need something to eat once they’re hatched, and there is evidence to suggest that if their favorite food, a type of zooplankton called a copepod, doesn’t hit peak abundance when the bass most need it, the bulk of those juveniles will not survive.  There is reason to believe that such a mismatch between copepod and juvenile striped bass abundance may have been the reason that 2024 juvenile abundance was disappointingly low, despite seemingly good water conditions.

And even if we do get a strong 2025 year class, that one year class isn’t going to change the bass fisherman’s world.  I sometimes hear anglers make comments that seemingly suggest that this winter could lead to good fishing in the 2025 season, but things don’t quite work that way.  While this winter could impact spawning success, it will have no impact on fish that were spawned in previous years.  The poor spawns that occurred from 2019 through 2024 will still leave a big hole in the population, and it still takes seven years to produce a seven-year-old bass—the average age of a fish in the current 28- to 31-inch slot—so the shortage of fish spawned between 2019 and 2024 is only going to become more noticeable as the big 2021 and 2023 year classes—mostly 50-pound-plus fish, at this point—age out of the population, the 2011s and 2015 suffer attrition from both natural and fishing mortality, and the 2018s become the focus of the recreational catch-and-keep fishery.  Beginning in 2026, when the 2019s would normally have produced most of the slot-sized bass, and more so in 2027, after the last of the 2018s grow out of the coastal slot, the years of poor spawns are going to be very much felt by everyone.

Some people disagree, and argue that there are still plenty of bass, but that most the fish have just decided to go someplace else.

One version of that argument says that as waters warm, the fish have just moved north, and are breeding in more northerly rivers.  Yet the Hudson River, the most northerly major spawning ground, has seen very poor spawns over the past couple of years, with 2023 producing the lowest year class since 1985.  And no one has ever documented significant striped bass reproduction in any New England river, although some very limited spawning takes place in both the Connecticut River and Maine’s Kennebec.

The other version of the argument is that the bass have moved offshore, and that there are great numbers of them somewhere near the edge of the continental shelf.  Support for this argument comes from occasional sightings of bass schools offshore, usually made by commercial fishermen, and from tag returns obtained by the use of pop-up satellite tags.  The truth is that bass sometimes to sojourn offshore, but an acoustic tagging study conduced off Massachusetts, based on fish captured offshore on the Stellwagen Bank, found that all such “offshore” bass soon return to their traditional inshore grounds.  And as far as the satellite tracking goes, proponents fail to account for a critical factor, which is the inherent inaccuracy of the satellite tags.  I have spoken to two different biologists about the issue, one employed by a university in Maine, and one here in New York, and both told me that the positions fixed by the tags can be off by as much as 30 miles in latitude and 60 miles in longitude—enough that a bass supposedly swimming a few miles north of Hudson Canyon might in reality be cruising the flats inside Great South Bay.  In the case of at least one much-publicized detection, which suggested that a bass was lingering at the outer edge of the continental shelf, the scientist from Maine told me that he was getting data from satellite tagged yellowfin tuna that were supposedly in the same vicinity, but that the data was indicating two very different water temperatures, meaning that either the bass or the tuna had to have been somewhere else.

So the trick, when we’re trying to figure out what the striped bass’ future might be, is to avoid both extremes, and try to be neither too hopeful nor too pessimistic.  Although it’s tempting to try to extrapolate future events from the facts that we have on hand, the existing uncertainty is great enough to render such attempts at prophecy generally unrewarding.

Still, there are some things that we know.  We know that we had poor recruitment from 2019 through 2024, that the Chesapeake is, by far, the most important spawning area for the species, and just two other rivers, the Delaware and the Hudson, are responsible for almost all of the rest of the fish that enter the coastal migratory population.  We know that the stock remains modestly overfished, and we know that overfishing is not currently occurring.  We know that there has been a trend toward warming winters and more quickly warming springs, and that colder winters and cooler, wetter springs tend to produce the strongest year classes of bass.

And that’s about the extent of our knowledge; everything else remains within the realm of speculation.

Based on that knowledge, we can reasonably expect the spawning stock biomass to increase over the next few years, even as relatively few fish recruit into the stock; the stock still could rebuild to the target level by 2029. 

We also know that the target level in 2029 might not be the same as it is today.  If that proves to be the case, it’s not because anyone “moved the goal posts,” as some skeptics might claim.  Instead, it’s because the National Marine Fisheries Service has discovered a seeming error in the Marine Recreational Information Program data, which is used to estimate recreational catch, effort, and landings, which they believe has lead to each of those values being overstated.  Corrected values will be available by 2026, and those corrected values will be incorporated into the benchmark stock assessment that is scheduled for completion in early 2027. 

Because recreational catch and landings play a big part in the stock assessment and in the calculation of the spawning stock biomass threshold and target, a downward correction in the recreational catch and landings would result in a downward revision in the spawning stock biomass reference points as well. 

But there will be nothing sinister about such change; instead, it will be just an example of how the “best scientific information available” works; as new and more accurate data is developed and incorporated into the models, new and more accurate reference points will be the result.

But regardless of whether the spawning stock biomass is fully rebuilt by 2029, it is likely to decline in the early 2030s as the poor spawning years leave their mark on the population.  If fishing mortality can be constrained to or below 2024 levels, the decline may not be too bad, with spawning stock biomass not dropping too much below where it is today.

How long SSB will stay at that level is a very different question, and one that’s impossible to predict right now.

The last period of poor recruitment ran from 1975 through 1988, with a couple of just-about-average peaks along the way.  If that happened again, just like it did in the past, we wouldn’t see a material improvement until 2033, and few mature fish until 2040. 

But nothing requires the future to mirror the past.  It is possible that we’ll see a strong year class produced this year, that will enter the spawning stock biomass in significant numbers by 2032, with good year classes being regularly produced every few years thereafter.

That’s the best-case scenario.

But it’s also possible that the recent climate trends will become permanent, or even accelerate, so that cold winters and cool, wet springs occur less often—perhaps once a decade, if that.  If such favorable spawning conditions occur less often, the striped bass fishery that we knew and enjoyed through the early 2020s is likely to become a mere memory.  Instead, the fishery may more closely resemble what we’ve come to expect from weakfish—a boom-and-bust fishery that generally sees abundance too low to support significant commercial or recreational fisheries, interspersed with occasional periods when, thanks to particularly favorable conditions, a big year class is produced and provides far better fishing.  Should such a fishery become the new reality, the good news is that, with proper management, the striped bass’ longer lifespans should allow the boom years to last a little longer than they do in the weakfish fishery.

But it still wouldn’t be like any bass fishery that we’ve ever known before.

Thus, the striped bass, and striped bass fishermen, face a host of possible futures.  Some look a lot like the past.  Some look distressingly new.  With no way to be certain about what is to come, it makes sense to hope for the best while preparing for the worst, and adopt management measures that emphasize maintaining abundance and a spawning stock that includes the greatest possible variety of ages and sizes—exactly what the current plan envisions—in order to achieve the greatest possible resilience, and a stock able to overcome whatever challenges nature or man might throw in its path.