I’ve never traveled to the Miramichi River but it sounds like an amazing place. Beloved by fly-rodders for more than 100 years, the Miramichi once offered a through-the-looking-glass view of what many of our local rivers probably looked like before the Atlantic salmon population was decimated by dams, pollution, overfishing and rising water temperatures. Some of the stories told of this historic Canadian salmon run are as recent as the mid-2000s, when anglers described the hundreds of thousands of salmon powering through the shallows as sounding like horses running up the river. Accounts from 50 years back tell of people being kept up through the night by their constant splashing.
That salmon run has been cut down to a fraction of what it once was, declining by 86% since 2012. On the other end of this issue is a localized population of striped bass. In 1993, commercial fishing had cut their numbers down to just 5,000 spawning age fish, a closure of the commercial fishery did not result in the numbers boost managers were looking for and they shut down the fishery completely in 2000. Now, 25 years later, they’re 10 years into a boom of stripers in the Miramichi, which are now estimated at around 500,000 spawning age fish, and some estimate their numbers may actually eclipse a million.
Salmon conservation groups, desperate for a scapegoat, have turned their ire upon the striped bass, lobbying the Canadian government to reduce striper numbers by a whopping 80%! Some of these groups have gone so far as to threaten to sue the government for ‘failing to provide a balanced ecosystem where the salmon could flourish’. The striped bass is a native species that is, clearly, better equipped to handle the changing environment than the salmon. In recent years, summer water temps along the Miramichi have regularly climbed above the salmon’s survivable threshold of 86 degrees, this has been a problem in many of Canada’s salmon rivers where numbers have also been in decline. Still, anglers and conservation groups point to the burgeoning population of striped bass and their assumption that the stripers are eating the juvenile salmon, as the main reason for the salmon’s steep decline. Even though studies indicate that salmon smolts and parr make up a tiny fraction of the Miramichi striper’s diet.
Anglers who have witnessed the Miramichi striper spawns compare them to Chesapeake Bay spawns in the early 2000’s; acres of spawning fish splashing as far as the eye can see. The Canadian government shuts down a 4-mile stretch of the river when spawning is observed so the bass can go about their business, un-harassed. Currently, the Miramichi is believed to host the most successful yearly spawn of stripers on the entire East Coast.
Things may not be what they seem, and I would caution salmon anglers and the Canadian government to, “Be careful what they wish for” when tampering with a booming native species. The curious part of this explosion in striped bass, is that these numbers appear to be way beyond what has been seen in recorded history. It would be a stretch to believe that the striped bass, a species that stands as a distant ‘second favorite’ among Miramichi anglers, would explode in numbers simply because they weren’t being fished for. The true reason may have come as a result of several things happening all at once, in combination with the moratorium.
For starters, water temps have risen steadily over the past 50 years, which has put a strain on the salmon, while at the same time, making things more hospitable for striped bass. As a result of this temperature rise, the salmon smolts are not surviving as well as they used to. The smolts grow into parr which measure between 5 and 9 inches in length and they feed on insects, small crustaceans, small finfish and yes, fish eggs and larval hatchlings. With a sharply declining salmon population, some believe it may actually be a reduction in the salmon preying upon striped bass, (consuming their eggs and larva) that has paved the way for this unprecedented inversion of abundance!
When I started reading up on this isolated population of spawning stripers, and the debates that rage on between salmon and striper anglers and how each of the segments of this encapsulated fishery want what they believe, to be accepted as fact so badly, that they will dismiss and discount anything that doesn’t support their solution, it made me realize how very important it is to navigate these issues with an open mind.
Some of us may look at this and take the angle that warming waters are forcing our local stripers to seek better spawning conditions to the north, but tagging studies indicate that Miramichi-spawned stripers rarely travel further south than Maine and most of them actually migrate north. Others may look at this as a contained experiment that proves that a closure will produce a similar boost in spawning success, but there appears to be more at play than just the result of a moratorium.
At the end of the day, our stripers are not seeing the spawning success that they did, even just 10 years ago. No one loves striped bass more than I do, and I’ll do whatever it takes if it means they will flourish. But I feel like there’s a deeper foundation to the spawning troubles our migratory fish are experiencing – that goes beyond abundance or spawning stock biomass – and we may need to look north to understand it. This is not an endorsement for any particular option being put forth by the ASMFC, it’s a merely a warning that, regardless of what fisheries managers decide later this month, we need to be prepared for the possibility that it doesn’t work out. And for whatever regulatory consequence may come as a result.
I want nothing more than a robust and successful striped bass stock, but if we can learn anything from this isolated population to the north, it’s that it all begins and ends with spawning success and maybe we’re not looking closely enough at the variables that affect it down here along the Striper Coast.
