The striped bass regulations for 2025 will remain the same as they are now.
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC) and its Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board (Board) voted on December 16 to send the striped bass regulatory efforts back to the full ASMFC through an addendum to the official management plan for striped bass. What this means is that in 2025 the ASMFC will look at ways to reduce mortality in 2026, with public hearings and discussions to ensue during the winter of 2025 and on through to until the annual ASMFC meeting next fall.
The final decision in Monday’s meeting came down to the debate between two options, one made by Adam Nowalsky of New Jersey to send the decision to a full addendum for regulatory rollout in 2026, and a substitute motion by Nichola Meserve of Massachusetts to have the Board implement regulations in 2025.
After more than 4 hours of discussion, debate and the various amendments to the options, the Meserve option giving the Board authority to make immediate changes for 2025 failed 12-4, while the motion by Nowalsky was approved 14-2 to allow for more comprehensive review during 2025 and to potentially take effect by 2026.
Specifically, what the Board approved was “to initiate an addendum to support striped bass rebuilding by 2029 in consideration of 2024 recreational and commercial mortality while balancing socioeconomic impacts. Options should include, if needed, a range of overall reductions, consideration of rec vs comm contributions to the reductions, rec season and size changes taking into account regional variability of availability, and no harvest vs no target closures. Final action shall be taken by the annual 2025 meeting (typically held during the fall) to be in place for the 2026 rec and comm fisheries.”
In the final tallies taken about 4-1/2 hours after the start of the meeting, the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Massachusetts voted in favor of the substitute motion by Meserve, with opposition votes cast by Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, D.C., the Potomac River Commission, NOAA Fisheries and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. As for the motion that passed, only Maine and New Hampshire voted in opposition.
Several members of the Board spoke in favor of the failed substitute motion, including New Hampshire’s Doug Grout who said he believed that something must be done immediately to address a forecasted overage in the recreational fishing community to come in 2025 by way of the Marine Recreational Information Program (MRIP), due in part to 2018 year class stripers entering the 28- to 31-inch slot range next season. Connecticut’s Matthew Gates also expressed his feeling that the Board should take action immediately in an effort to reach the 2029 rebuilding target for spawning stock biomass (SSB).
In opposing the failed motion for more immediate action, New Jersey’s Joe Cimino said he would prefer to see the ASMFC take up the decision through a more comprehensive process of collecting data and public comment. “I’m strictly opposed to this because the timing is such that I think we have to go through an addendum process,” Cimino added, a position supported by Maryland’s Mike Luisi. “I’d rather have an addendum,” Luisi said, noting that more needs to be done with data collection and more recent management changes in order to develop a fuller understanding of the striped bass fishery.
“What I’d like to do, and what I think the addendum does, is that it provides us with an opportunity to implement the things that we have learned over time,” Luisi added.
Delaware’s John Clark noted how the failed option only provides a “prescriptive next step” without take a more holistic look at the entire fishery. “Let’s learn what we’ve experienced in the past and let’s use some type of creative outlook to the future,” Clark said, noting that his support for the option that ultimately passed was that it would allow managers to look at more data including all of the 2024 MRIP data before making a decision.
While some members of the public wanted to see the Board act immediately on 2025 and will undoubtedly criticize the final vote as taking no action to support the rebuilding of the striped bass SSB, Nowalsky pointed out that the Board’s final decision “is not a no action alternative.”
“By going ahead and taking action for 2025 to be deliberative about how these reductions should take place if needed in 2026 still gives us time to achieve that rebuilding,” Nowalsky said. He went on to point out where preliminary MRIP data from March through October was already indicating a lower amount of striped bass mortality than was originally predicted. “So, I would submit that having the full suite of data about those 2024 removals through Wave 6 (November/December) puts this Board in the best possible scientific position to make a decision on how to keep rebuilding on track for 2029,” he added.
At issue for both the ASMFC and its Board is the need to rebuild the striped bass SSB to a 247-million-pound target to meet a 2029 rebuilding timeframe. At present ASMFC calculations, the SSB of striped bass today stands at roughly 191 million pounds. Based on a technical committee forecast that MRIP numbers will show a potential spike in 2025 as the 2018-year-class enters the 28- to 31-inch slot range, the ASMFC and its Board has assumed that there’s only a 43% of reaching the SSB target by 2029. Thus, the final options presented in the failed motion by Meserve would’ve amounted to a 9% reduction for the recreational sector in 2025 through various regional closures, and a 5% cutback in commercial quotas, in order to increase the rebuilding chances to 50%.
For anglers fishing from Maine to Rhode Island, that would’ve resulted in either “no-harvest closures and/or no targeting closures in Wave 3 (May/June) plus the number of days needed in Wave 5 (September/October) to achieve a combined 9% reduction across both waves, to be implemented in uniform dates across the region.”
For those anglers fishing in a region from Connecticut to North Carolina, the Meserve motion would have resulted in “no-harvest closures and/or no targeting closures in Wave 2 (March/April) and Wave 6 (November/December) to achieve a combined 9% reduction across both waves, to be implemented in uniform dates across the region.”
Those types of regional options for the coastal region may be coming for 2026 – along with additional restrictions throughout the Chesapeake, as well as seasonal closures or size limit changes in area-specific fisheries in New York, Pennsylvania and Delaware, coupled with commercial quota reductions – but not in 2025.
As it stands now, expect to see a series of public hearings scheduled on a state-by-state basis in the coming year, sometime after the ASMFC Winter Meeting slated for February 4-6, 2025, in Arlington, VA.
Anglers and recreational industry leaders should keep in mind the typical process by which ASMFC functions; as per the ASMFC Program Overview statement, “the main objective of fisheries management is to allow enough harvest to sustain and build the fishing and seafood industries while protecting the productivity and sustainability of the marine ecosystems.” The accompanying graphic below taken shows the flow of decision-making, with the Commission itself at the highest level, with advisory panels, technical committees, plan development and review teams all providing support to the species management boards and sections.
