It's Not Over Yet!!

[Broad Bill]

Originally Posted by JBradley44

Ain’t that the truth. Definitely other factors at play to but when there’s no bait there’s no fish.

It's the fact they grossly overestimated the reproductive estimates of bunker. As a result they also grossly overestimated how many could be harvested by Cooke Inc. without impacting the sustainability of the stock, the impact on water quality and the bays inhabitants like stripers. Now nature's natural filtration system for the bay keeping it clean for generations isn't close to the numbers needed and the Chesapeake as a result has become an unsustainable cesspool causing historically low young of the year numbers of juvenile striped bass. If a stock has no recruitment, it has no future. Add to that the predation by blue catfish which Virginia stocked decades ago again based on bad advise from fisheries management, also using Peer Reviewed protocols, no one factored in the expansion of the stock and extent of predation and damage they'd cause and now we not only have a problem in the bay, we have a coastal wide problem with stripers and a problem with every species including crustaceans in the Chesapeake.

It's somewhat equivalent to when F&G stocked too many lake trout in Round Valley not realizing natural reproduction was taking place which caused an overpopulation stunting growth rates of the entire stock. Cause and effect, the ocean is one tightly balanced food chain. Change one dynamic and you impact every link in the food chain. With stripers, management is just now addressing the result, still not addressing the cause. Cooke Inc. / Omega One needs to be pushed out of the bay and to some degree the ocean, urban and agricultural pollution needs to be addressed and to Andy's point on a different thread, an invasive species, the blue catfish which was stocked by Virginia, needs to be addressed and eradicated. They're taking over the bay and surrounding estuaries and rivers killing everything.

All this, by the way, using data from processes which passed Peer Review which is why I 've always said on this site that fisheries management based purely on scientific Peer Reviewed data, while necessary, not accompanied with common sense best in class industry practices will never end with the intended and desired results.