It's interesting watching the recent posts about Maryland's rockfish open commercial fishery. Looking at the image above I had to wonder about just which fish are being harvested. Are these pre-spawn striped bass that are staging, yes even now, in the Chesapeake Bay?
They say a female striped bass reaches sexual maturity between 4 - 8 years of age. Looking at size, length and weight charts and we see that 4 year olds, and some reach spawning age later, are somewhere between 21 and 28 inches, which falls in the okay-to-harvest sized fish for the commercial fishery down now in the CB. In addition to the commercial fishery the rec anglers are out there as well and getting into big pre-spawn females as well. A recent report,
We've all seen those schoolie bass that are shaped like footballs, especially in the fall, when they gorge on sand eels and peanut bunker. But right now in the CB are they really on the chew? Is there bait down there in big numbers and are the fish really looking to eat in during the dead of winter during a Polar Vortex?
A look above gives you some of the buoy data from in and around the Chesapeake Bay. Water temps are around freezing, or 32 degrees Fahrenheit. So are these fish even that active right now? I kind of picture them hanging low in the deeper water and being caught up in the haul seines used during winter commercial fishery.
Looking above we see the bloated bellies of harvested striped bass. Are we looking at young egg laden female striped bass? It looks so to me.
Striped bass spawn when the water temps start to hit the 50's which in the CB can be as early as April. Are these spawning striped bass part of the SSB biomass as determined by the ASMFC? In 2023 the SSB was determined to be at 75% of the target, which is 247 million pounds. There is also a threshold level, which is used to determine if the stock is at risk for being overfished.
The target of the SSB includes those big cow striped bass that we see during the spring and fall runs but also every other female ready to go striped bass. There has to be some wonder if, in all of our harvesting, catch and releasing, and dead discards, we are continuing to hammer down on the females which are really the cornerstone of the fishery.
The males generally max out around 34 inches which is 20 pounds on a good and fat day. Those bigger fish are females, and the biggest and oldest are the big egg producers. They say the big girls can release millions of eggs ready for fertilization, usually done by a group of pesty horny males that stay and bother them all the way up the spawning rivers.
These are aren't crabs or lobsters so there's really no way to determine if the bass you, or the commercials, choose to harvest. A 26 inch bass is a 26 inch bass and that can be male or female. You can't turn them over and see if they are egg laden or not and throw them back into the water. And, those nets don't discriminate between male or female, but if they can fit through it or not.
Several of the larger scale operations down in Maryland, and maybe Virginia, do a big business catching fresh rockfish, freezing them, and mailing them out and around the world. This isn't a man and his dog on a boat just catching some fish for sale at the families market they've owned for 100 years. It's business, and big business. And these are the shareholders who were a force, along with Adam Nowalksy, who put the kibosh on any type of change in regulations for 2025.
So I have to wonder. How many bass can we continue to take? From the ocean.
From the bays. From the rivers.
And from the biomass.