Bass Facts Video

 Laurel Barnett, Westwood High School,MA, created this video to provide some basic information about striped bass.

Striped bass or Rockfish can be found on the Atlantic coastline of North America from the St. Lawrence River to Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico. They are an anadromous fish, living in salt water but breeding in fresh water. The striped bass was plentiful along the Atlantic coast in the early years of English settlement. “During his maiden voyage into the Chesapeake Bay in 1608, Captain John Smith observed of the striped bass, “I myself at the turning of the tyde have seen such multitudes that it seemed to me that one mighte go over their backs drisho’d.”      http://suffolklawreview.org/rapone-striper-management/

Overfishing of striped bass for the use as fertilizer resulted in the first conservation legislation. “In 1635 William Wood bragged about landing up to three thousand bass in one net strung across a small creek. The colonists knew this mauling couldn’t last forever. Four years later, the Massachusetts Bay Colony prohibited the use of striped bass and cod as fertilizer. It was the country’s first conservation measure. In 1670 the Plymouth Colony imposed a tax on the sale of stripers, and used the money to fund the first public school.”          On the Run by David DiBenedetto.

A major decline in striped bass populations occurred in the 1970’s and 1980’s as a result of overfishing and deterioration of habitat (e.g., damns, pollution, climate change). The commercial catch dropped from 14.7 million pounds in 1973 to 1.7 million pounds in 1983. A moratorium on fishing for striped bass in Chesapeake Bay was imposed by Maryland and Delaware for 5 years from 1985 until 1989. The development of a coast-wide management plan by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) has been important in the protection of striped bass. Limberg and Waldon, 2009. Dramatic declines in North Atlantic diadromous fishes. Bioscience 59: 955-965.

Striped bass supports a lucrative recreational fishery and, in some states, supports a commercial fishery as well. The near loss of the striped bass fishery continues to trigger disagreement on how to stabilize the population through regulations and habitat protection.

Each fisher has her/his own ideas of the importance of tide, wind, and currents in locating fish, of the time of day or phase of the moon when the striped bass are more likely to bite, and of the best method to catch one. In many cases the advice passed from one fisher to another is contradictory. Thus, unraveling the many mysteries of secret lives of striped bass will require questions and hypotheses that can be tested.

Close your eyes and have someone read the following paragraph to you as a way to visualize the striped bass:

“Imagine a brook or square tail trout averaging from three to sixty pounds, give him a silvery skin with a dark blue-green back, and a series of black stripes running in parallel lines from gill plate to tail, and you have a fair picture of the striped bass.  A handsome fish:  solid, rugged, firm-meated and full of fight.  You can get a good idea of their swimming power when you realize that these fish can feed in ease and comfort in the boiling surf, can rip through a breaking wave ten feet high like a razor blade, and from twenty pounds up can run fifty to eighty yards against a fairly heavy set star drag while you collect your senses after their strike.”                                               Striped Bass: Where, when and how to catch them by Oliver Hazard Perry Rodman