Stripe Aberrations For Identification Of Individual Striped Bass

Since 2017 our team of investigators, students, and interns have captured images of individual Striped Bass during taggings and with underwater video. This effort has resulted in an archive of images of tagged fish who return to Eel Pond multiple years in a row. With the identification confirmation of the acoustic telemetry tags and external loop tags we have established that stripe patterns on individual fish do not significantly change year to year and fish can be identified by unique stripe pattern disruptions and markings.

These natural, physical identifiers have practical applications, the most important of which is the potential to use stripe patterns as a “visual tagging” method with out physically implanting a tag.

To this end, we have partnered with our friends at the GotOne app to integrate an AI photo function in the GotOne app that can match fish by their markings via photo. Our archival photos and their team of AI engineers are teaching visual AI models to recognize unique stripe patterns in striped bass. The function is currently in development and we are very excited to test it in the coming months.

Fish 5378 (above) was tagged in 2021. 5378 returned in 2022, 2023, and has returned again in 2024. Using archival video footage we were able to identify 5378’s presence in Eel Pond in 2020, the year before it was tagged.