STRIPED BASS: CAMERAS (AND BAD FISH HANDLING) KILL

 

It gets kind of ridiculous, particularly in these days of a 28- to 31-inch slot size limit for coastal striped bass.

Somebody catches a big fish, a bass likely to break 40 pounds, and maybe even break 50.  After a long fight, they bring the bass into the boat or drag it onto the beach, then start digging for their phone or  camera as the fish lies gasping on the deck or the sand, trying to breathe.  Eventually, the photos are taken, with the bass kept out of the water for a minute, two minutes, or more as the angler strikes multiple poses for multiple snapshots before finally putting the fish in the water where it can, hopefully, finally take a good gulp of water and start breathing again.

At times, the bass just lies there, floating on its side, and when that happens, more times than not, the angler will sort of swish it back and forth in the water for 30 seconds or so, hoping that it might revive itself and slowly swim off into the distance.  Sometimes, that happens, and when it does, the angler will assure anyone who asks that “It swam away strong.”

When it doesn’t, and the bass continues to float, the angler might swish it back and forth a few more times, and if continues to lie prostrate on the ocean’s surface, console himself by saying, “Sometimes that will just happen.  There’s nothing that I can do.”

But some recent research provides reason to question whether any of those statements are really true.

As I have noted in previous blog posts, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission has stated that

“The recreational [striped bass] fishery is predominantly prosecuted as catch and release, meaning the majority of striped bass caught are released alive either due to angler preference or regulation (e.g., undersized, or the angler already harvested the daily bag limit).  Since 1990, roughly 90% of total annual striped bass catch is released alive of which 9% are estimated to die as result of the fishing interaction (referred to as ‘release mortality’ or ‘discard mortality’).  In 2024, recreational anglers released alive an estimated 19.1 million fish, of which 1.7 million fish are assumed to have died.”

Since those 1.7 million bass that died after being released are approximately equal to the number of bass harvested by recreational fishermen in 2024, and are more than 2 ½ times as many bass as were killed in the commercial striped bass fishery (landings and discards combined) in the same year, they definitely affect the state of the stock.  Taking reasonable action to reduce release mortality thus makes sense.

Unfortunately, too many anglers don’t really understand what “reasonable action” involves.  A few years ago, in an effort to maintain a sustainable fishery, they have replaced harvesting fish with something that well-meaning folks titled “C.P.R.”, with the three letters standing for “Catch.  Photo.  Release.”

Although the effort was well-meaning, and was intended to offer an alternative to catch-and-kill, the emphasis on photographing one’s catch turned out to be a bad idea, particularly in the social media age, when websites such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and others have become flooded with still photos and videos of not-particularly-notable striped bass being waved around in the air, lying on people’s laps or on the decks of boats, or stretched out, sand-covered and gasping, on an ocean beach.

It didn’t take much thought to realize that such poor handling practices weren’t good for the striped bass, although we couldn’t really quantify just how bad they might be.

But now we know, thanks to a paper titled "Effects of capture and handling on striped bass (Morone saxatilis) in the recreational fishery of coastal Massachusetts,” which appeared in the August 2025 issue of the journal Fisheries Research.  It provides a pretty good understanding of just how much handling, and how much time out of the water, a striped bass can take.

As explained by the paper’s authors,

“Understanding how striped bass respond to capture and handling, particularly air exposure, is crucial for improving management and angler practices to maximize post-release survival.  This study evaluated the physical and physiological condition of 521 striped bass subject to catch-and-release angling across different gear and tackle types and five air exposure treatments using reflex action mortality predictors.  A subset of striped bass (n=37) caught on conventional gear and double treble hook lures were fitted with triaxial accelerometer biologgers to assess short-term post-release activity across three air exposure treatments…

“The integration of reflex action mortality predictors (RAMP) and triaxial accelerometer biologgers has become a reliable method for evaluating the cumulative effects of capture and handling on fish during release.  Assessment of RAMP involves evaluating the presence or absence of multiple (usually between 2 and 5) reflexes identified to be consistently present in vigorous individuals.  Previous studies provide evidence that these tests are often predictive of short-term post-release behavior and/or mortality.  Triaxial accelerometer biologgers effectively quantify fine-scale activity, behavior, and short-term mortality of fish after release.  These biologgers are attached to fish in a minimally invasive manner and measure acceleration (g) across three axes (x, y, z).  When combined with RAMP assessments, they provide detailed insights into additional aspects of the angling event and environmental conditions, helping to bridge critical gaps in our understanding of how fish respond to capture, handling, and recovery.  [references omitted]”

All of the fish sampled were caught, using standard conventional and fly fishing techniques, between May 6 and October 24, 2023, and between May 5 and July 3, 2024, off the coast of Massachusetts.  Researchers measured both the fight time and the handling time.  The fish ranged in size from 10 to nearly 40.5 inches in length, with the mean size of the fish caught on conventional gear just under 28 inches and the mean size of the fish caught on fly gear about three inches smaller.

The researchers found that the time handling fish out of the water mattered. 

A lot.

 

As noted in a description of the study provided by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (the lead researcher is a member of the UMass/Amherst staff)

“The stripers were divided into groups that remained out of the water for 0, 10, 30, 60, and 120 seconds before being thrown back.

“This was the first time that air exposure was scientifically and systematically tested to see its effects on striped bass…

“[The researchers] discovered that air exposure was the most significant factor influencing striped bass stress and post-release swimming activity.  Higher water temperatures, fighting for longer periods of time and getting hooked somewhere other than in the jaw all increased their recovery time.

“Fish released immediately or after only 10 seconds retained most of their reflexes and recovered quickly, [one of the researchers] said, adding that ‘stripers that had been out of the water for 60 seconds took 8-10 minutes to swim similarly to the low air exposure group.’

“In addition to finding fish out of water for 120 seconds never fully recovered during the 20 minute monitoring time, they also found that the bigger the fish, the greater toll of being hooked, landed, and released.  Reducing angler impacts on big fish, particularly females, is critical to the future of the population.”

The current slot limit was put into place to protect the older, larger female striped bass, which are believed to produce more eggs, larger eggs, and eggs more likely to produce viable fry and are, particularly given the current period of poor recruitment and abundance decline, deemed to be too valuable to intentionally kill.

But the efficacy of that slot limit can be, and very possibly is being, substantially reduced when those older, larger striped bass—perhaps the “50” that an angler has been seeking for the past two or three decades—are unintentionally killed by anglers who land them after a difficult fight, drag them into a boat or onto the shore, and then keep them out of the water for an extended photo session.

And even though smaller bass are probably somewhat more resilient, the Internet hero and self-declared “influencer” who walks around on a jetty with a Go-Pro attached to his head, or who has cameras set up on his kayak, so that he can film every 10-pound bass that he catches for his YouTube channel isn’t doing the stock too much good, either.

So if we really want to help the striped bass, the first step is to keep the cameras at home, so that fish can be released as quickly as possible, preferably without taking them from the water at all.  To all of those folks who are about to object that they’re fishing from boats, and have to bring the bass on board in order to unhook it, I’ll only say this:  I’m fishing out of a 32-foot Topaz, a traditional inboard sportfisherman with its rails a long way from the water.  And just about every week during the summer, I take out a team of researchers from Stony Brook University, who manage to bend far over those rails to perform surgery on sharks that might be small, or might weigh upwards of 300 pounds, along with taking blood and tissue and fecal samples.  If those researchers can cut open the abdomen of a shark, insert an acoustic tag, and then sew the fish back up before release, if they can find a blood vessel in that shark, insert a needle and take the needed sample, and if I can snap the hook with a bolt cutter and then reach down with a pair of needle-nosed pliers to remove the remains of the barb from a shark’s jaw, then an angler can lean over the side of the typical outboard with the same sort of pliers—or perhaps a dehooker—and unhook a striped bass without removing that fish from the water at all.

And to those surfcasters who fish from jetties and rock ledges, and say that they can’t safely perform an in-water release much of the time, my question is whether, after they unhook the fish up in the rocks, they feel confident that they are going to get a good release on a fish that might need some reviving before it swims away.  Because if someone truly cares about the striped bass’ future, as so many surfcasters claim to do, tossing a fish back in the water in the mere hope that it survives should not be good enough.  They should either fish from places where a good release—preferably an in-water release—is possible under existing conditions, or not target striped bass in such places at all.

As anglers, we are by far the greatest source of striped bass fishing mortality, responsible for 86% of all such mortality in 2024, and an even greater proportion in previous years.  With the striped bass facing an uncertain future, we are ethically obligated to minimize that mortality to the extent that we can.  As the recent research shows, proper fish handling, which includes foregoing long, out-of-water photo sessions of the fish that we catch and keeping bass out of the water for the shortest possible time, can help keep mortality down.

For while the original form of C.P.R. may help the victim of a drowning or heart attack, the kind of C.P.R. that’s applied to striped bass too often leads to unintended death.