There has been much debate on whether or not the ASMFC made the right choice regarding striped bass back on December 16th. There are so many angles being played, hyped and propped up as right or wrong, I honestly don’t even want to go there. But as this war rages on, something very interesting is taking place right under our very noses, and I don’t think anyone is even considering it.
We have an interesting set of variables at play, some are positive, some are negative. On the positive end, we have a steadily increasing spawning stock biomass (SSB). This is the estimated amount of reproductively mature female striped bass present in the fishery, it is measured in pounds. The fact that this number is trending upwards means that recent regulation changes – dropping from a two-fish limit to one and instituting a slot limit – has helped turn the tide, it has allowed the ASMFC to declare that the striped bass is no longer experiencing overfishing and that ever-lengthening line on the chart shows that the SSB continues to climb.
This is good news, but it’s not overly surprising; the most robust year classes we have in the pipeline are well into their peak reproductive years and the last strong year class, 2018, is coming of age now. So we have the mature stock we need to create another strong Young of the Year (YOY) class. (The YOY index is a measurement of spawning success determined by spawning surveys throughout natal estuaries for striped bass.)
On the negative end of things, we have experienced 6 straight years of weak or failed spawns – in both the Chesapeake Bay and the Hudson River – in varying degrees. You may remember my December 2024 editor’s log, Change Comin’ ‘Round the Bend, where I listed several of the reasons why a robust spawning stock might be failing to produce strong YOY numbers; those ranged from weak flows and higher water temperatures to an increase in predation thanks to a boom in the blue catfish population. As I said in that column, none of these things are helping, but I will admit that I find it difficult to believe the catfish are playing a major role.
Nature hangs in a delicate balance and it often doesn’t take all that much to throw things out of whack. Look at how the use of mass amounts of fertilizer in the thousands of farms that line the rivers that empty into the Chesapeake Bay have led to massive algae blooms, which consumed all the oxygen in the water and created expansive dead zones where seemingly nothing survives. Once thriving marshlands and estuarine environments, rendered uninhabitable by fertilizer.
The spawning requirements of striped bass are quite unique. Their eggs need to be laid in freshwater, they require water temps between 57 and 68 degrees, and the fertilized eggs need to be kept in constant motion for several days, a distance that measures out to nearly 50 miles! This is a very delicate balance that was created over millennia, when winters and springs were reliably wetter, colder and snowier. With climate change now an accepted and factual phenomenon, it makes perfect sense that this needle would become increasingly difficult to thread.
But then the winter of 2025 blew in, with a very unusual pattern of winter weather. As of this writing two strong storm systems have bucked decades-long trends, leaving a decidedly southern swath of snowpack, piling snow into the mountains of Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania; sugaring the foothills of Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. Additionally, the winter of 2025 has been much colder than any of the winters of at least the last 5 or 6 years. Could this outlier, this more stereotypical East Coast winter, become the burden of proof?
Snow in the higher elevations serves as a massive reserve of cold, clean runoff. As this frozen water melts, it will fill the streams, which will race to fill the rivers. Water temps should be cooler, flows should be higher and, if the trend continues through the rest of the winter, the striped bass that head up into these rivers to spawn should find optimal, dare I say ‘classic’, spawning conditions with plenty of cool flow to keep those eggs in motion.
If we see a nice, big YOY number for 2025, the old school winter is probably the reason. As of this writing, yet another winter weather disturbance has set its sights on the southeast and mid-Atlantic region. I’m not the biggest fan of cold winters, I like the occasional big storm, (even if my aching back doesn’t), but this year, I’m putting my back on the line and praying for snow. It just might be exactly what the striped bass fishery needs.