This guy should be smiling. He may be disappointed, but he is happy with his catch. Like I said yesterday, shit happens. What I also said in yesterday's post was how fragile a fishes gills are. It's like slicing through an artery in your arm or neck.
This whole post here came from the Betty and Nicks Bait and Tackle Fishing Club page. While you know I hate using other's people's content to make content, this was so timely I just had to. It tells a story. Two buds out in the dark on a relatively chilly night hardcoring it during the beginning of the fall run.
He had a single hook on his plug. He was doing everything he could to give a striped bass a fighting chance after being caught. His intentions were to practice responsible catch and release fishing. And if he was planning on taking a slot fish home for dinner, then good for him. But he wasn't.
This is what many people think makes up the 9% catch and release mortality figure that we've, or they'd, used for decades. That 9% of the striped bass caught and released died. That 9%, well 8%, number came from a study done, and then published, in 1996 by Diodati & Richards. It was groundbreaking for its time and was the standard bearer of all things bad with catch and release fishing. Although there were truths behind the study, like J- hooks and circle hooks, and where
the fish was hooked and the conditions it was released into, it was a bit hard to generalize every kind of C & R angler as a 9% killer. When guys stand up in the meetings or say to the ASMFC, "Hey, where did you get that number?", well here it is. And you can read that paper, above, HERE.
Other studies have been done to see how striped bass fare after being caught, mostly on bait and with earlier J- hooks which are not legal anymore, at least for bait fishing for striped bass. In Maryland they would catch a bunch of fish, collect the data and then transport the fish to a net pen and wait.
Of the fish that died, in the Maryland study, 75% died within the first six hours, and the remaining within 24 hours. It came down to hooking mortality, like the guy's fish on the top, and then there's angling stress, which we are all guilty of, especially anglers that like to cast 1,500 feet into current, and then drag the fish, well flog them, up river, or up to the boat, only to swim away strong for the 10 minutes they're out of the water, before they die within 24 hours. You can read the Maryland stuff, HERE.
In 2012 John Tiedemman from Monmouth University released his paper on catch and release practices for striped bass. He too referenced the Diodati and Richard's study
(1996) and the Bettoli and Osborne study (2011). That later study was conducted in the Tims Ford Reservoir in Tennessee and tracked, by transmitter, striped bass that were caught and released. This study looked at fishing method, temperatures in release conditions, and the fishes ability to maintain equilibrium, and or their ability to regulate their air bladder. So they swam away strong, only to wind belly up within 24 hours. You can see a video of Tiedemann and his panel discussing best C & R practices, HERE. You might know a few names like Tabory, Popovics, and Lynch who join the panel.
So that brings us to some more news. I got notice of a new American Saltwater Guides Association post, HERE. In it is discusses the release of the study done by the Massachusetts DMF, who has been in the forefront of this dating back to Diodati in 1996. They have caught striped bass, tagged them, some with acoustic tags, and tracked them. They've also included citizen reporting which brought the number of fish in the study to 8,300, quite a large pool to study.
In the end there's a good chance the 9% C & R mortality rate is half of that, somewhere around 4.6%. And those using artificials and flies, WITH SINGLE HOOKS, even lower around 2%. I had to italicize that or else my neanderthal plug throwing pals wouldn't let me hear the end of it.
So what does that all mean? It means, well nothing. Is it good that the number MAY be lower, absolutely. Can we all do better, yes. Is it a little fishy that this comes out a day before the ASMFC meeting tomorrow. Where No-Target and No-Harvest on are the proverbial table? Kinda. What is interesting is how things, like studies and data, get released kind of leaning to Status Quo (Do nothing) or No-Harvest (See it's only 4.6%). I'm telling you, it's all about money and politics, with a little bit about the actual fish.
And it's a shame that the guy who posted it had to write a disclaimer along with it. Not only was it written, it was written in CAPS. It does just go to show there's times when, "Nothing I could do...", is what it comes down to. Fishing is a sport, and there's winners and losers, and sometimes the striped bass lose.
We'll see what happens tomorrow starting at 945. Gonna be a long day.
