Maryland’s annual survey of juvenile striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay returned its second-worst result since the survey began in the 1950s.
It also was the fifth year in a row that the annual survey, released last week, showed numbers well below the historical average.
The young-of-the-year survey, conducted by Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, yields an index, which represents the average number of recently hatched striped bass captured with each pass of a large seine net. The long-term average index is 11.1.
This year the index was 1.0.
It continues a rough patch for Maryland’s state fish, also known as rockfish. Considered the state’s most important commercial and recreational fish species, striped bass rebounded decades ago from the brink of collapse, following a five-year fishing moratorium in the 1980s.
DNR fisheries managers called this summer’s survey troubling, and said they’re considering tightening regulations for the season ahead.
That could bring an end to Maryland’s spring trophy season, currently a two-week period when recreational anglers can target only the largest rockfish. It also could extend Maryland’s summer closure for recreational striped bass fishing, which lasted for two weeks this July, said Lynn Fegley, DNR’s director of fishing and boating services.
Meanwhile, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, a multistate compact that sets fishing limits on the East Coast, is considering new restrictions, tightening size limits for striped bass caught by recreational anglers, and reducing quotas for commercial fishermen.
“It certainly gives us a cause for concern,” Fegley said of the newly released data. “We expect variability in their reproduction numbers, and we know that right now, there are sufficient spawning stock out there to produce a good year class, but we’re just not seeing it materialize.”
It’s possible the problem is tied to mild winters over the past several years. With warmer temperatures, and less snowmelt to cool the waters, striped bass could be migrating up the Chesapeake earlier than usual to spawn.
The “working hypothesis,” Fegley said, is that the fish’s early arrival could be hurting the chances of survival for young striped bass.
“There’s potentially some disconnects happening between when the fish are laying their eggs and the eggs are hatching, and when the food that the baby striped bass like to eat is available,” Fegley said.
Research has shown that warmer springs could be impacting the availability of zooplankton in the Chesapeake, a key food source for newly hatched striped bass.
‘It hasn’t been what it used to be’
The young-of-the-year numbers for rockfish have been known to fluctuate greatly from year to year, driven by temperature and weather conditions. So there’s still hope for better luck in the year ahead, Fegley said, but five years of poor data is prompting plenty of internal discussions about what needs to change.
“We could wind up finding ourselves with a few years where conditions are quite good. If we get nice, rainy springs,” Fegley said. “We just don’t really know. But that’s one of the reasons why we really want to make sure we’re working to bolster that spawning stock to give them every chance they have when those conditions line up.”
That’s why Maryland officials are talking about extending the summer closure by a week, into the first week of August, Fegley said. When air and water temperatures are higher, rockfish face greater stress, and are more likely to perish after they are caught and released.
Captain Drew Payne, who operates a fishing charter boat called Big Worm, said he has been frustrated by the summer closure. He feels the two-week stoppage is a “drop in the bucket” when it comes to reducing the harvest, but it can deal a big blow to his business.
July is among the busiest months for charters, said Payne, who operates his boat from Deale, and sometimes from Dundalk. If Maryland officials are determined to close the striped bass fishery in the summer, he’d prefer it take place solely in August, when Payne said he’d find solace in fishing for other species such as cobia farther south. This year, he decided to take his boat in for maintenance during the two-week closure, instead.
Payne said he doesn’t feel nearly as strongly about the potential loss of the spring trophy season because changing conditions have made that period, which ran from May 1 to May 15 this year, a lot less fruitful, sometimes frustrating charter customers.
“If they took that away, most of the guys would just shrug their shoulders,” Payne said. “It hasn’t been what it used to be, and it’s taken a lot of the fun out of it.”
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission took emergency action in May, banning recreational anglers from harvesting rockfish longer than 31 inches. The idea was to protect fish from the most recent above-average class of juvenile fish, from 2015.
Those fish are now of the age and size that they have moved out of the Chesapeake and into the Atlantic Ocean, said Allison Colden, the Maryland executive director of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, an Annapolis-based environmental nonprofit.
And that seems to have prompted a boom for recreational striped bass fishing along the coast in 2022, she said. That harvest nearly doubled compared with 2021, which the commission called “unprecedented,” and was accompanied by higher mortality.
“Because those fish are available to those coastal states, their fishermen are having a heyday,” Colden said. “That’s why those emergency measures in May were put in, because it was like: ‘Whoa, hold on. This is a problem.'”
Currently, the commission is considering regulations that would further restrict the acceptable sizes for harvest, with what’s known as a “slot limit,” where there is both a maximum and a minimum for a fish’s length.
After a meeting this week, commission officials will open a draft of the possible changes for public comment, before making a final decision at their winter meeting in January.
Maryland DNR will pay attention to what the commission considers, and announce its plan for the 2024 fishery by late December, Fegley said.
Payne said he’s concerned about the side effects of narrower slot limits, since his charter customers may have to hook a larger number of fish to keep their limit: two per person. Fish that don’t fall within the slot will be discarded, but they could die anyway.
“We are going to kill so many fish catch-and-releasing, trying to catch our limit,” Payne said. “It will just be mind-blowing.”
Numbers are a ‘wake-up call’
That’s part of the danger in establishing slot limits, DNR’s Mike Luisi said.
Fisheries managers are searching for a happy medium that will lower the number of fish removed from the water without dramatically increasing the number that are caught and released.
“Let’s say you have to catch 100 fish to keep one,” said Luisi, the assistant director of the monitoring and assessment division in DNR’s Fishing and Boating Services. “That’s not good either, because all of those fish you’re throwing back to keep that one? Some of them are dying.”
But Colden called last week’s numbers a “wake-up call,” adding that they highlight the importance of states like Maryland taking a step beyond what the commission requires, by extending fishery closures in the early spring and in the summer.
“The last time that we saw something this low, or lower, was 2012, when some pretty drastic management actions were put in place to try and reverse the trends that we were seeing back then,” Colden said. “So, we’re hoping … that some significant actions will be made at [the commission] and even within the states themselves.”
Rockfish are facing new pressures, including rising water temperatures associated with climate change, Colden said. And the jury is still out on whether the rising numbers of invasive blue catfish, known for their voracious feeding habits, are having a significant impact on rockfish as an emerging predator.
“On the one hand, we’re not as low as we were in the ’80s when the moratorium was implemented,” Colden said of the overall rockfish population, “but we also have a lot more new challenges.”
