Virginia and two New England states are urging other East Coast fishery managers to move quickly to curb striped bass catches in the wake of a new assessment that found the prized species was being overfished.
The Virginia Marine Resources Commission is poised to act as soon as Tuesday, when it is scheduled to take up a staff recommendation for an emergency shutdown of the state’s spring striped bass trophy season, which targets the largest fish in the population.
The action comes in the wake of a new stock assessment that found striped bass along the East Coast were in worse shape than previously thought and had been overfished for several years.
The preliminary findings were presented to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, a panel of East Coast fishery managers, in February. The commission is expected to formally adopt the assessment at a meeting April 30, at which time it will also be briefed on harvest reduction options that could reverse the trend.
The commission’s process to adopt new regulations normally takes many months, though, and at its February meeting it was unclear how quickly the ASMFC would act, especially as it had not yet received the full assessment.
But in an April 17 letter sent to James Gilmore, the commission’s chair, environmental officials from Virginia, Massachusetts and Connecticut say “we cannot afford to continue unsustainable levels of fishing” as the commission mulls its response to the assessment.
“Scientific evidence and what fishermen in our states are seeing on the water tell us that bold action to protect striped bass is long overdue,” they wrote. “Rebuilding striped bass stocks and sustaining them at target levels of abundance is incredibly important to fisheries in our states. We urge the Commission to implement measures that will reduce striped bass harvests to sustainable levels as quickly as possible.”
They called for the commission to commit to adopt new measures by its October meeting, while urging states to act sooner on their own. States that take early action, they said, should get credit for those efforts when new conservation measures are established by the commission.
For their part, Virginia officials have proposed closing the state’s spring trophy season, which in Bay waters is scheduled to run May 1 through June 15 and targets fish at least 36 inches long. In the state’s Potomac River tributaries, the season is from April 20 through May 15, with a minimum size of 35 inches. Along the Atlantic coast, the season runs May 1 through May 15, with a 36-minimum length.
Those large fish are popular for anglers, but are also important to the health of the overall population because they produce a disproportionately large number of eggs. Although striped bass spend most of their lives migrating along the coast, most are spawned in the Bay’s tributaries.
The post Bay Journal – Quick action urged to end striped bass overfishing appeared first on OutDoors Unlimited Media and Magazine.
