Striped Bass Harvest Doubled in 2022, and Hopes for Stock Recovery Dwindled

Last fall, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission released a report saying that while striped bass were “overfished,” they were not “experiencing overfishing.”

That is fishery-management-geek talk for “there are fewer striped bass overall than we would like there to be, but the number of fish being killed each year is allowing the stock to creep back up.”

Well, by the time that report was made public, the opposite was apparently true — and it looks like it’s going to take some pretty drastic measures by those fisheries geeks to get things under control.

Recreational anglers killed twice as many striped bass in 2022 than they did in the two previous years, according to data presented to the ASMFC at its winter meeting.

Anglers took home more than 3.5 million striped bass last year. With the numbers of fish caught and released hovering around 30 million, and estimates that about 9 percent of those die after being released, it means that recreational fishermen probably were responsible for something upward of 5 million striped bass being removed from the population last year.

The reason for this leap in the number of fish killed by anglers last year is that a lot of striped bass grew into “keeper” size last year in the states that use the 28-to-35-inch slot limit.

When 28 inches was first introduced to the striped bass management program in the 1990s, the number was seized on by fisheries managers, because a 28-inch fish is, according to growth estimates, about 8 years old and has about a 50/50 chance of having spawned at least once before it could potentially be killed (deliberately, that is).

Well, the “year-class” of striped bass born in the Chesapeake that year was large. It was one of the 10 largest year classes on record — but it was a rarity amid a now 15-year run of mostly horrible spawning years for striped bass that includes some of the worst “recruitment” years since the disastrous years of the early 1980s.

So those fish generally reached that magic 28-inch size last year, and suddenly a lot of anglers were catching “keepers” galore.

The problem is that a tenuous plan by fisheries managers to rebuild the flagging striped bass stock was dependent on harvest forecasts that stayed about consistent with the number seen in the first two years of fishing under the recreational slot limit.

This, of course, was asinine thinking, when fisheries managers had to know that the biggest group of fishing in the population were growing toward harvestable size.

So we are left facing a unenviable choice.

The federal board that manages striped bass has done about as horrendous a job as could be imagined over the last 15 years. Scientists and fishery observers saw that spawning recruitment was declining as ecological conditions in the regions where stripers spawn tilted against them with the changing climate. They saw the numbers of fish declining. But they refused to dial back harvests to stave off a decline in overall population.

They also refused to order coastwise population assessments, year after year after year, until 2018, when the first assessment in more than a decade showed, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, that the stock was in shambles, and that far too many striped bass were being killed for it to have any chance of recovering.

Enter the slot limit.

Conservation-minded striped bass anglers had been calling for a slot limit for years — decades, even — to protect the largest fish that are prodigious spawners, are prized by anglers and drive tens of millions in economic output whether they are killed or not. (The one good thing Instagram has done for fishing is make good photos of living fish fresh out of the water valuable in their own right.)

So fisheries managers said there would be a slot, and they actually asked anglers and other interest groups what they thought the slot sizes should be. Not that it was completely a democratic process, but there was broad support for a slot that kept the minimum size at 28 inches, as it had been since the 1990s, and cap the keeper size at 35 inches.

Like many striper anglers who had been calling for an increase in the minimum size to at least 32 inches for years, I was of the belief that in light of the shite situation the fish were in, we should err on the side of protecting more fish and set the bottom of the slot at 32 or 33 inches, and let fishermen keep fish up to 39 or 40 inches. As I’ve argued, letting fishermen keep those slightly larger fish also provides more meals to those who are taking them home for each fish they remove from the population.

Proponents of the 28-inch minimum had argued that by keeping it at the historic level, it would allow more casual anglers to have a better chance at taking home a fish for dinner. It’s a reasonable consideration — the stock is not just for the sharpies who know how to or have the means to target trophy fish for their feeds, and 28 inches had worked as a minimum size when there was a large population and several good year-classes matriculating through the stock.

The problem was that nobody seemed to be taking the 2015 year class into account and the sensitivity it would have to extreme focused harvesting in a slot limit situation. That key demographic of fish was already getting whaled on by Chesapeake anglers, who are allowed to keep fish as small as 18 inches, and soon it would come into the sights of the huge numbers of striper anglers in the Northeast. And with the only other sizable year-classes of stripers in the stock — the 2008 and 2011 fish that are now trophy-sized fish over 30 pounds — removed from consideration for taking home to eat, anglers will be quicker to grab a 28.5-inch fish when they get one.

Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened, and the scientists who develop the models that predict how stocks will rebuild now say there is a basically no chance that striped bass will recover to a sustainable, health stock level in the foreseeable future if things remain the same.

So the answer should be easy — change things, dammit! Push the slot limit up to remove those 2015 fish. Seems like a no-brainer, right? Well, that’s not so easy, and it only moves the needle a little bit, since those 2015 fish will continue growing.

The biggest problem, as with everything, is political influence (which means the legalized bribery by certain interest groups) in the system. Our own former congressman once called for a New York delegate to the ASMFC to be removed because he had advocated for more strident controls on recreational fishing to allows stocks to rebuild — he called him an “anti-fishing, fisherman” and had almost no facts correct in an op-ed that The Fisherman magazine actually ran in print.

He got his way. It was a pathetic display all around. And that is why we are where we are with striped bass (and fluke, and bluefish, and weakfish).

The ASMFC didn’t act while the striped bass stock collapsed over a decade, and they have had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the paltry reductions they’ve imposed on fishing as it is — and they’ve refused to lift the legal loopholes that allow completely corrupted states like New Jersey and Maryland to sidestep the coastwide slot regulation.

The ASMFC will have a chance to change the slot limit next month and jump-start the fix to the problem. They almost certainly will not do it, and they probably won’t do it next year. Maybe the year after. By then, the 2015 year class will be a shadow of its former self, and the striped bass stock may well be doomed to a tortuously slow recovery, if it can recover fully at all.

The first fish are showing up. There probably aren’t any 2015 fish here quite yet, but it will be any day now. If I had a suggestion, I would say: Throw ’em back.

But catch ’em up. See you out there.