October 26, 2020 — Striped bass can’t get a break, it seems. With their East Coast population in decline from overfishing, the migratory species had mixed success reproducing in the Chesapeake Bay this year, surveys show.
The state Department of Natural Resources reported last week that its annual trawl survey of newly spawned striped bass in Maryland waters yielded just 2.5 little fish per net haul — far below the long-term average of 11.5 per sample.
“We just didn’t have good recruitment [of young fish] this year,” said Mike Luisi, the DNR’s director of fisheries monitoring and assessment. “It kind of just goes along with everything else in 2020 that’s just been tough.”
This is the second straight year and the 10th in the last 15 years that the DNR survey found evidence of below-average striped bass reproduction.
A separate study done by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science found an above-average number of juvenile striped bass in that state’s tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay. It was the eighth straight year in which the survey tallied an average or above-average abundance for the species.