Fish
Striped Bass
Morone saxatilis · also called striper, rockfish, linesider
The striped bass is the fish that a huge part of the American East Coast fishing world revolves around, from surfcasters on a November beach to charter boats on the Chesapeake. It is a silver, seven-striped predator that lives in the sea but is born in a river, and its story is one of collapse and comeback.
Overview
Morone saxatilis is native to the US Atlantic coast, silvery with seven or eight black horizontal stripes, commonly 5–15 kg and sometimes over 25. It eats other fish, driving baitfish schools against the shore in feeding “blitzes.”
Sea life, river birth
It is anadromous — living most of the year in coastal ocean waters and running up rivers in spring to spawn, mainly in the Chesapeake, Delaware, Hudson, and Roanoke. The eggs are semi-buoyant and must drift in a current to survive, which is why river flow, and dams, matter so much.
Collapse and recovery
The Atlantic stock crashed by the early 1980s. A coast-wide fishing moratorium and strict limits rebuilt it, and it was declared recovered in 1995 — a textbook fisheries turnaround.
Status
Least Concern and abundant, but tightly managed, and flagged as overfished whenever weak spawning years meet heavy harvest.
Striped Bass: common questions
Is a striped bass the same as a rockfish?
In the Chesapeake Bay region and much of the mid-Atlantic, "rockfish" is simply the local name for the striped bass, and menus and fishmongers there use the two words interchangeably. This causes confusion because on the Pacific coast "rockfish" refers to dozens of unrelated species in the genus Sebastes, the reef-dwelling fish also sold as "Pacific red snapper". The striped bass is neither of those; it is a temperate bass in the family Moronidae, related to the white bass and the European sea bass. So a rockfish sandwich in Baltimore is striped bass, and a rockfish taco in San Francisco is a Sebastes.
How did the striped bass recover from its collapse?
By the early 1980s the Atlantic striped bass population had fallen to a small fraction of its former size, driven down by decades of heavy fishing, pollution of the Chesapeake spawning rivers, and a string of years with poor spawning conditions. In response, the states along the coast, coordinated through the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, imposed a near-total fishing moratorium in the mid-1980s in the key states, held it for several years, and then reopened the fishery only under strict size and catch limits. The stock rebuilt steadily, and it was formally declared recovered in 1995. It remains one of the most cited examples of a well-managed recovery of a collapsed fish stock.
Why do dams affect striped bass so much?
Because of how the eggs develop. A striped bass egg is only slightly denser than water, and it needs to stay drifting in a moving current for the two or so days until it hatches; if the current is too weak the eggs sink to the bottom and are smothered in silt or eaten. The spring spawning runs depend on rivers carrying enough flow at the right time in the stretches where the bass spawn. Dams, and the diversion of water for cities and agriculture, reduce and alter that flow, and they can also block adult fish from reaching historical spawning grounds entirely. Restoring flows and, in some rivers, removing dams are part of striped bass management.
What is the best way to catch a striped bass?
There is no single answer, because striped bass are pursued in very different settings. On the northeastern coast, surfcasters work the beaches and rocky points with lures and cut bait, especially during the autumn migration when bass herd baitfish against the shore in feeding frenzies. In the bays and rivers, anglers troll, drift live baits such as eels and bunker, or cast to breaking fish. In freshwater reservoirs, boaters follow schools with electronics and use live shad or deep-diving lures. Across all of these, the fish tend to feed most heavily at dawn, at dusk, at night, and around moving tides or wind.