By james art 
There is a lot of debate about whether ASMFC made the right choice about striped bass on December 16thS There are so many angles that are played, inflated and propped up as right or wrong, honestly I don’t even want to go there. But since this war is raging, something very interesting is happening just below our noses and I don’t think anyone even thinks it.
We have an interesting set of variables in the game, some of them are positive, others are negative. At the positive end we have a constantly growing scope of stock biomass (SSB). This is the estimated amount of reproductively mature female striped bass present in fishing, it is measured in kilograms. The fact that this number is up to upwards means that the recent changes in regulation-restriction of two fish to one and the creation of a limitation of the slot-possible to rotate the tide, it allowed the ASMFC to declare that the stripes already It does not experience over -fishing and this continuous extension of the diagram line indicates that SSB continues to climb.
This is good news, but not too surprising; The most stable annual hours we have in the pipeline are many in their peak reproductive years, and the last class for a strong year, 2018 is coming now. So we have mature stocks that we need to create another strong class of young from the year (YO). (The anniversary index is the measurement of the success of spawning, determined by studies to spawn into the nanal mouth for the strip of bass.)
At the negative end of things, we experienced 6 makes weak or unsuccessful cavities – both in the Bay of Chesapik and in the Hudson River – to varying degrees. You may remember the log of my December 2024, Change where I have listed several of the reasons why stable caviar may not be able to produce strong numbers at the age of age; These varied from weak streams and higher water temperatures to an increase in predation thanks to the boom in the population of blue catfish. As I said in this column, none of these things help, but I will admit that it is difficult for me to believe that catfish plays a major role.
Nature hangs in a delicate balance and often does not take everything so much to throw things out of impact. See how the use of mass fertilizers in the thousands of farms that outline the rivers that are emptied in the Bay of Chesapiq have led to massive flowering of algae that consumed all the oxygen in the water and created expansive dead areas where nothing at first glance survives. After the Marshlands and the Estuarine Environment made of fertilizer flourished.
The requirements for spawning striped bass are quite unique. Their eggs should be laid in fresh water, they require a water rate between 57 and 68 degrees, and fertilized eggs should be kept in constant movement for several days, a distance that measures up to nearly 50 miles! This is a very delicate balance created for millennia, when winter and springs were reliably moist, more cold and snowy. As the climate change is now accepted and a factual phenomenon, it makes an ideal sense to make this needle increasingly difficult.
But then the winter of 2025 blew up, with a very unusual winter time model. In this writing, two strong stormy systems have fallen for decades, leaving a decisive southern part of the snow package, accumulating snow in the mountains of Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania; Sugar Foot of Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey. In addition, the winter of 2025 is much more common than any of the winter than at least the last 5 or 6 years. Can this external, this more stereotypical winter on the east coast, become the severity of proof?
The snow of the higher hills serves as a massive reserve of cold, clean outflow. As this frozen water melts, it will fill the streams that will compete to fill the rivers. The water rates should be more cool, the flows should be higher and if the trend continues for the rest of the winter, the striped bass that heads to these rivers to spawn, it must find the optimal, I dare say ” Classic “by throwing caviar with many of the caviar conditions with many of the casting conditions of a cool flow to keep these eggs on the go.
If we see a nice, big annual number for 2025, the old school winter is probably the reason. To this writing, another disturbance of winter time has directed its glances in the Southeast and Middle Atlantic region. I’m not the biggest fan of cold winters, I like the random big storm (even my pain doesn’t), but this year I put my back on the line and I pray for snow. It can just be exactly what the strip fishing needs.