I have been waiting to see the 2023 Delaware River Striped Bass Recruitment Seine Survey results for months now. Jim Hutchinson, of The Fisherman magazine, mentioned that the results were poor after his coverage of the NJ Marine Fisheries Council meeting in January. I guess the DEP sent over a teaser for that meeting, but I have not seen anything on it.
I decided to write Jen Pyle, the Senior Fisheries Biologist in New Jersey. The above was her reply. Click on it and it gets bigger. Now, is there a more hot topic out there than the striped bass now? Isn't the Delaware River one of the big three natal rivers? Haven't the Chesapeake and Hudson YOY reports already been published.....c'mon man, or woman.
Now we really haven't had good surveys over the last several years. 2002 was completed, and years 2020 and 2021 weren't done or were incomplete due to Covid. How does Covid affect people dragging nets along the river and counting fish? C, mon man, or woman. Below are the 2020 numbers,
The above numbers represent a % of the species collected, not necessarily a YOY geometric means. NJ may do it a bit different. An example, in 2019 there were 958 striped bass collected. Of that 841 were YOY, or less than 1 year old. The YOY index (geometric mean) was 1.31, which ranks it 13th highest out of the 42 years they have been collected, they started in 1980. You can see below the 2019 seine
