An Easy Way To Reduce Striper Mortality

Let me start this week with a single assumption: We need to kill fewer striped bass.

As discussed last time, we humans killing fewer striped bass is not alone going to ensure a quick rebound in their stock. But with the climatological deck stacked against them these days, we should be laboring to take fewer fish out of the population each year — as much for our own sakes, as for theirs.

From the looks of things, our undeniable pattern of warmer winters is making it likely that stripers are probably going have fewer great spawning years, with longer gaps between them, in the coming decades than they historically have. Mother Nature has a way of getting over such hurdles, and the striped bass stock probably will find a way to prop itself up, eventually, but there is no telling how long from now that will be (or where … perhaps Nova Scotia?) so it might be a long time that we are left muddling through with a substantially reduced total striped bass population.

We can’t do very much in the short-term to help adult stripers produce more baby stripers, but we can do a lot to reduce the number of stripers we take out of the population each year so that we have more to catch next year.

There is a segment of the recreational fishing community who thinks there should be a moratorium on the harvest of striped bass. I don’t think we have reached that point — yet — and as someone who counts striped bass meat as one of my favorite foods, I would hate to see it come to pass. But I understand the sentiment.

Abundant striped bass, especially large ones, drive a mammoth sport fishing industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars that would be only marginally reduced if anglers were not allowed to harvest stripers for table fare. Of course, a lot of Montauk charter captains would probably find a chunk of their annual charters in those margins, and the bottom lines of many commercial fishermen would take a modest, but not-inconsequential, hit.

Also, a moratorium on the harvest of striped bass would not mean that no striped would be killed.

One of the most jarring and problematic revelations that came out of the most recent federal stock assessment — other than that the striped bass stock had been grossly over-fished for a decade, just like anyone paying attention could have guessed — was that nearly half of all the striped bass that are killed each year are fish that recreational anglers caught and released either too badly wounded by the lacerations from hooks or exhausted and unable to revive themselves.

In the vast majority of cases, the number of fish thrown back with no chance of survival could be greatly reduced or essentially eliminated simply by changing angler behavior. Being gentle with a caught fish, using single hooks instead of trebles and taking time to revive an exhausted fish, would definitely make a difference.

This is where we need to make improvements, first and foremost, because every “dead discard” is a 100 percent wasted fish. More than 3 million each year.

That’s 3 million fish — every single year — that will never be caught again, but didn’t feed anyone. Simply because anglers are, mostly, just lazy, callous and uncaring about the resource that drew them to the water in the first place.

I’d like to think my words alone could convince some to embrace conscientious changes in behavior, but human nature is what it is and trying to convince someone that they are wrong about something these days is tantamount to heresy, so we probably need fisheries managers to force us.

Start with treble hooks. They should be all but eliminated from the striped bass fishery.

Doing away with “snag and drop” bunker fishing, one of the deadliest methods of catching stripers — literally and figuratively — was a damn good start, certainly. Requiring circle hooks for bait fishing is a sound and easy enough step, too.

But there is no reason not to take those kind of precautions further.

I think there should be a rule that no artificial lure should be allowed to have more than one treble hook and it would be even better and perfectly reasonable to mandate that no artificial lure have more than one affixed hook of any kind.

Getting rid of the treble hook on the back of swimming plugs or poppers would do away with a huge number of fish that get the triple hooks lodged in the back of their throats, the same way they did when they inhaled a bunker with a weighted treble snagging hook impaled in its back.

Even a single hook on the rear of a lure can be problematic with fish getting them down their throats, too, and, frankly, a lone treble hook on the belly of a plug or popper is going to catch the majority of the fish that hit it and will rarely find their way far enough down the gullet of a fish to cause real damage.

Either of these would be fairly easy requirements to impose and relatively easy to enforce. Within a couple years, lure manufacturers and tackle shops would do most of the “enforcement” work themselves.

There are a ton of stripers on our beaches right now, most of them too small to keep, but representing the future of our fishery. Be aware of how you handle them or someday we may not get to handle them very much at all.

Happy Thanksgiving. See you out there.