[SaltyVet1973]

Striped bass are officially in a death spiral.
Maryland released the results of the 2025 Striped Bass Young-of-Year Survey. The press release calls it “…an improvement over recent years…”. Nice try. The only way to describe the 2025 spawn in the upper Chesapeake is an abject failure. Worse, it is the seventh year in a row that striped bass have failed to reproduce at a meaningful rate.


Here’s the dynamic the stocks now face. It takes a year-class approximately six years to reach reproductive maturity. Because we are now in a seven-year spawn drought (with no indication that things will change in the future), we are now on our second generation of fish that have not produced a single strong year class. Conditions were good this year, too, so there was optimism for a modest rebound. It didn’t happen.
The deck is stacked against the species. Dwindling SSB, warming water temperatures and low oxygenation in Chesapeake Bay. Even so, regulations focus the commercial harvest on large, breeding-sized females. The very fish on which the future depends. And in response the ASMFC nibbles at the edges of their latest plan to rebuild the Atlantic striped bass stock by 2029.
The plan won’t succeed. It can’t succeed.
Consider that the ASMFC has already admitted the 2025 year-class is a lost cause. Current regulations are intended to protect the 2017 and 2018 year-classes, which were the last years of above-average success. But guess which fish are ending up on ice headed to market? That’s right. The slot fish and overs that everyone is excited about are what remains of those fish. And every striped bass that dies by net, hook-and-line, or as bycatch further diminishes the chances of a recovery.
Stripers Forever has been attacked for our consistent call for an equitable coast-wide harvest moratorium, but we remain steadfast in our belief that it is the best—and perhaps only—policy that can work to give striped bass a chance to return to abundance. Maybe now someone on the striped bass management board with courage and influence will speak up and stand up to the watermen and the for-hire fleet and do the right thing.
It’s long past the time for an equitable coast-wide harvest moratorium.