More than two months before biologists threw their first net into the water to gauge the success of this year’s striped bass reproduction, Ed Martino had the answer, and he never had to leave his desk.
Rockfish reproduction, Martino determined in May, would be “well below average.”
The researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Cooperative Oxford Laboratory came up with his conclusion by going online and looking at March though May river flows monitored by the U.S. Geological Survey and temperature data from Baltimore-Washington International Airport for the same period, then plugging the information into a mathematical model.
While Martino crunched numbers in his office, a team of biologists from the Maryland Department of Natural Resources waded into the water at 22 locations once a month from July through September. At each site, they did two sweeps through the water with a 100-foot seine net, then counted everything they caught.
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