Out of 5 deployed ‘sat tags’ 1 has been retrieved.
We got one!
In the October edition of The Fisherman, we spotlighted our StriperQuest ’25 event this past May (Striped Bass: Assessments, Addendums & Angler Engagement) and the five high-tech tracking devices deployed in striped bass this spring. As Roxanne Willmer from Gray Fishtag Research noted in an email to our Northeast Striped Bass Study team over the summer about the event, “with record-breaking numbers, this year’s StriperQuest was our largest expedition yet.”
“There were 25 teams and 125 anglers, captains, and mates coming together in the name of science,” Willmer said of the May 14th event, adding “Together, we tagged and released over 300 striped bass and deployed five satellite tags, a new benchmark for our study.”
In addition to four MiniPAT units deployed in larger 40-inch and over class fish, this year the Northeast Striped Bass Study team – lead by the experts at Gray Fishtag Research – also introduced the MicroPAT satellite tag from Wildlife Computers, a state-of-the-art tracking device is designed to study smaller class fish. “Unlike previous years where we tagged larger class fish, this new technology will allow us to study our 29-inch striped bass candidate to compare migration patterns to our past larger class fish,” Willmer noted, while adding “Our tags are programmed for five months, and we can’t wait to see where these fish travel.”
Five months of course would put us squarely at the print date of this November edition of The Fisherman Magazine on Sunday night, October 19th. That being said, we do have some news to report from our satellite tag recovery team. One MiniPAT in particular deployed aboard Chuck Many’s Tyman back in May released prematurely offshore of Rhode Island after just 6 weeks. “I just received a call that the physical tag was located,” Willmer texted me back in August, adding that upon initial review, “The migration track followed the similar route as many in the past making its way to the Nantucket Shoals.”
Land Of The Giants
While we didn’t get the full 5 months of depth, light and temperature data as we hoped, the 6 weeks was just enough to show how yet another jumbo 40-inch and over striped bass, tagged off Sandy Hook in May, ostensibly a post-spawn fish leaving from the Hudson, Delaware or Chesapeake spawning estuaries, headed mostly in an easterly direction from the Jersey Shore through the federal Exclusive Economic Zone (the EEZ or “forbidden zone” for striper anglers) before ultimately settling in for the summer along the Nantucket Shoals.
Over the past decade or more, the Nantucket Shoals have become the place to be during the summer months to catch true doormat fluke of 10 pounds or better. As The Fisherman’s Mike Hachey wrote in Dinosaur Doormats: Planning A Trip To Nantucket Shoals for the July edition, “the area of the Shoals itself is nearly the same size as the state of Rhode Island.” As described in numerous science journals, Nantucket Shoals is an area of “dangerously shallow water” in the Atlantic Ocean that extends from Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, eastward for 23 miles and southeastward for 40 miles, where water depths can be as shallow as 3 feet. Scientist noted that depth soundings are unpredictable due to the constant change caused by strong currents, “which are rotary rather than reversing.”
And what makes this area of ocean water located offshore of Nantucket, MA so productive for big fluke and summer-over stripers, may perhaps be what also makes it a crucial feeding ground for the North Atlantic right whale which feeds on zooplankton aggregations at the Shoals, particularly during the peak season from March through July. As noted in a 2024 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the hydrography of the Nantucket Shoals region is primarily influenced by the cooler and fresher source waters north of the region, and the warmer and saltier waters sourced offshore from the Gulf Stream.
Some of the feature areas of the Nantucket Shoals include Middle Rip (32 NM from Nantucket at 40° 57.775’ N / 69° 22.323’ W), Fishing Rip (28 NM from Nantucket at 41° 01.278’ N / 69° 27.678’ W) and Davis Shoal (17 NM from Nantucket at 40° 58.072’ N / 69° 54.563’ W). Certainly there are quite a few captains fishing the unsettled and nutrient rich waters of the Shoals inside the line every summer, but it’s hard to fathom how many of those enormous spawning class stripers might remain just outside in the EEZ throughout New England’s summer season.
In The Name Of Science
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) will be meeting in Dewey Beach, DE from October 27 through October 30 with the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board slated to vote on a proposal to reduce striped bass fishery removals by 12%, with management measures implemented in 2026. That meeting will be held on Wednesday, October 29 starting at 9:45 a.m. and continuing until the end of the day’s session at 5 p.m. In the recreational fishery, a 12% reduction would mean some semblance of seasonal closure totaling a month or more in the Atlantic Coast striper fishery beginning next year.
Also coming in 2026 is a new benchmark stock assessment on striped bass which will ultimately be peer-review and analyzed in 2027 to provide a full analysis and review of the condition of the striped bass stock through consideration of new data sources and newer or improved assessment models. ASMFC has been openly soliciting data sources that will contribute to the goals of the assessment, including “data on landings and discards, catch per unit effort, biological samples (length or age frequency), and life history information (growth, maturity, fecundity, natural mortality).”
| TAGGED BASS AT NANTUCKET |
| Be sure to check out Nantucket Shoals: Whales, Doormats & Jumbo Stripers by Jim Hutchinson, Jr. from the November, 2022 edition of The Fisherman for more on the Nantucket Shoals connection to the Northeast Striped Bass Study since 2019 (point your cellphone’s camera at the QR code to open the article. To learn more about The Fisherman’s work with Gray Fishtag Research since 2019 go to TheFisherman.com and look for Striped Bass Study under the Topics bar at the top of the page. |
That said, while our partnership with Gray Fishtag Research since 2019 through the Northeast Striped Bass Study has tagging data available from 15 high-tech tracking devices and about 300 returns from over 8,000 green streamer tags deployed along the Atlantic Coast, until we’re able to get researchers interested in analyzing all of this available data there’s not a lot of interest for stock assessment professionals either.
The good news is that Dr. Adam Aguiar, an Associate Professor at Stockton University in South Jersey and frequent contributor to The Fisherman joined us for StriperQuest ’25 and is looking forward to helping get a better handle on the Gray Fishtag Research striper data. Dr. Aguiar, by the way, was also onboard Tyman on May 14 and was the angler who caught our first tag retrieval of this year’s study.
“The use of satellite tags on various species has been established in the literature as useful in gaining insight into a population’s health and migration,” said Dr. Aguiar of the ongoing Gray Fishtag Research tagging efforts along the Striper Coast, noting how there have only been a few satellite studies published on striped bass.
“These, however, have been done on stripers of small, non-spawning size in specific spawning locals, and not on our mixed-migratory stock seen in spring and fall off the coast of New Jersey into New England,” noted Dr. Aguiar, adding “There have been a few studies (however sparse) that have been done on our mixed migratory stock, though none yet by satellite tagging measures to my knowledge.”
Next Steps?
While it is generally accepted by the research community that striped bass migrate ‘offshore’ beyond the three-mile-line, to what degree and how that may be changing with the recognized uptick in water temperatures is not defined with much certainty. “Even the few studies that used non-satellite tactics in monitoring their movements in the ocean do not give clear delineators for mileage ‘offshore’, let alone the literature having established a common consensus for how far is even considered ‘offshore’ or if those distances should be categorized into segmented ranges for better future data assessment,” Dr. Aguiar said, adding “this Gray Fishtag study may enable us to more accurately define boundaries and distances from shore for which the stripers frequent.”
Dr. Aguiar and his team from Stockton University plan to look more closely into the Northeast Striped Bass Study data in hopes of helping connect the research community with “citizen scientists” which NOAA Fisheries describes as “a volunteer who participates in one or more aspects of the scientific process, such as data collection.”
| LEARN MORE & SUPPORT |
| A huge thanks to our continuing sponsors of the Gray Fishtag Research and the Northeast Striped Bass Study, including American Fishing Wire (AFW/HI-SEAS), Berkeley Striper Club, Fisheries Conservation Trust and the Manhattan Cup, Hudson River Fishermen’s Association, Penn, Seaguar, Yamaha, Yo-Zuri, and the Many, Glassberg and Nova families.
To learn more about the 501c3 nonprofit work at Gray Fishtag Research and how you too could help sponsor the Northeast Striped Bass Study, go to grayfishtagresearch.org. |
In a June 2, 2025 bulletin released by NOAA Fisheries (How Does Citizen Science Support Fisheries Stock Assessments?) the federal fisheries service spotlighted the potential to expand the use of citizen science data in stock assessments. “Citizen scientists have a long history of important contributions to marine science,” the bulletin noted, adding how anglers for example collect information on water quality, marine mammal sightings, and fish size and health, all of which contributes to effective marine resource management.
From 2019 through the fall of 2024, Gray Fishtag Research and The Fisherman, thanks to the generous support of our Northeast Striped Bass Study partners, has deployed a total of 32 satellite tracking devices in 32 different striped bass from Virginia to the east end of New York, 15 of which were found and returned to Gray Fishtag Research. A simultaneous tagging effort with partners in the angling community has resulted in nearly 8,000 green streamer tags deployed along the Atlantic Coast, with hundreds of returns already registered.
While it’s still too soon to see this data incorporated into the next benchmark stock assessment on striped bass coming in 2026/2027, the authors of the recent “citizen science” research coordinated by NOAA Fisheries found that data collected through fish tagging programs had the broadest utility for stock assessments, adding “These data help to define stock boundaries, estimate growth, and document fish habitat preferences.”
For active supporters of the Northeast Striped Bass Study, that should offer a glimmer of hope for the continued tagging efforts along the Atlantic Coast. “It is a big misconception that we know all about striped bass behavior, especially under constantly changing environmental conditions,” said Dr. Aguiar while adding “Seeking understanding to novel unanswered questions about the migration of the Northeast’s mixed-migratory stock, specifically, has more unrecognized value to anglers, conservationists, researchers, and even policy-makers then most even realize.”
