RICHMOND — Virginia fishery managers and others from Maine to North Carolina, as well as members of the public, convened on Tuesday to decide the next steps to protect the future of Atlantic striped bass, a valued and remarkable animal facing consecutive years of low spawning success and an overfished stock.

Atlantic striped bass have been referred to as “everyman’s fish” because they are caught by such a wide population of anglers up and down the coast, said Alex McCrickard, the aquatic education coordinator for the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.

Their native range in Virginia spans from the freshwater spawning grounds of inland, tidal rivers like the Rappahannock, York and James to the salty, ocean waters off the Eastern seaboard.

Regulations for Virginia’s coastal, migratory striped bass stock are managed by the Virginia Marine Resources Commission in conjunction with the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), who manages interstate fishery regulations for the stock between Maine and North Carolina.

Anglers can utilize a wide range of gear types and techniques to catch striped bass. Some target the fish for the excitement of catch and release, while others seek them out to harvest as a culinary staple.

As a resource, striped bass make up one of the “most valuable recreational fisheries on the Atlantic Coast,” said Emilie Franke, a fishery management plan coordinator for ASMFC. “I think one of the really unique things about it is that the fisheries really vary from state to state.”

“The Chesapeake Bay is as important to the striped bass and its successful life history” as the fish are to the coastal communities and economies of the region, said Allison Colden, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s executive director for Maryland.

Striped bass rely on the tributaries and tidal estuaries of the Chesapeake Bay as a “foundational nursery ground” for the first few years of their lives, said Tom Dunlap, the riverkeeper for the James River Association. “As a top predator in the Bay ecosystem, (striped bass) are important for their relationships with all of our other species as well.”

An estimated 70% to 90% of all of the striped bass that make it into that coastal migratory stock start their lives in the Chesapeake Bay and its estuaries.

An unpredictable future

Climate change is a major factor contributing to the decline of striped bass, and it is one that is much harder to control than the overfishing that was uncovered by researchers in 2019.

Striped bass prefer cool, wet winters and springs, and as those conditions become less common as a result of climate change, “the probability that we are going to hit the lotto with the right combination of environmental conditions is becoming lower and more rare,” said Colden.

Wet springs produce high discharge volumes throughout the tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay, which expands the habitat available for striped bass to spawn in, said Martin Gary, director of the Division of Marine Resources at the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

At the same time, those rains flush nutrients into the rivers that are necessary for zooplankton to successfully bloom, a critical food source for striped bass after hatching, Gary said.

If zooplankton are not successful, or if the timing is off between their bloom and the striped bass spawning runs, fewer fish will survive to bolster the future spawning population.

The concern today, Gary said, is that if we continue seeing consecutive, poor young-of-year classes, what will the stock biomass look like over the next decade?

“We’ve got a double edged sword where we’re not getting very good recruitment because of environmental factors, and the spawning stock biomass is low too,” said Pat Geer, chief of fisheries management for the Virginia Marine Resources Commission.

Virginia has seen two consecutive years of historically low numbers of juvenile striped bass surveys, while Maryland has witnessed six consecutive years of low numbers. The data is compiled in a yearly stock assessment to give managers a sense of the reproductive success and early survival rate of the fish.

Below average juvenile stocks mean that “once the adults that are currently in the population start to either be harvested or die out, there are very few young fish growing up to replace them,” said Colden.

“It’s going to take a long time to rebuild a population like striped bass that doesn’t mature until five to seven years of age,” said Geer. But building up the spawning stock biomass is “something we can control overtime.”

Gary said in the past, striped bass proved to be resilient, fortuitously, and bounced back after a moratorium was placed on the fishery in the 1980s due to fears of losing the species to extinction. Within ten years after the moratorium was put in place, striped bass were declared recovered up and down the coast.

Although Gary said the adult striped bass stocks are in much better shape today now than they were in the 1980s, managers cannot depend on the recovery witnessed in the early 1990s now that a new set of challenges exists, “especially in the face of climate change and the impacts of rapidly warming waters and changing marine and estuarine ecosystems.”

Changes to fishery regulations

New regulations were put in place last year by the Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board , which oversees interstate striped bass management for ASMFC, to establish a consistent size and bag limit throughout the Chesapeake Bay portion of the fishery.

Fishing seasons, on the other hand, are not consistent throughout the Bay, with management divided between multiple jurisdictions including Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia and the Potomac River Fisheries Commission.

Outside of shortening the fishing seasons, managers are “really running out of options,” said Geer. Virginia already has a “pretty conservative” recreational harvest season of only about 100 days, one of the shortest on the East coast, he said.

Currently, “no-target” closures for striped bass don’t exist in Virginia, meaning it is legal all year for recreational anglers to target the fish for catch and release. Virginia fishery managers are not proposing to add any additional regulations outside of what could be agreed upon this year by ASMFC, said Geer.

Maryland Department of Natural Resources, meanwhile, proposed a new layout for its 2026 fishing seasons to the board on Tuesday that includes a no-target closure for striped bass fishing during the entire month of August, to limit the recreational fishery’s impact while water temperatures are high.

However, they also proposed eliminating the no-target closure that is currently in place in Maryland waters during part of the spring spawning period, thus opening the entire spring season to catch and release fishing.

Maryland fishery managers stated in their presentation to the board that “the proposal is an effort to refocus our conservation effort on the protection of the resident population in the Chesapeake Bay and realign with our neighboring jurisdictions.”

The Chesapeake Bay Foundation has “for a long time” advocated for seasonal, summer closures as a way to protect striped bass during the time of year when they are most vulnerable to catch and release mortality.

“There are other fish species in the Bay at that time that are available to fish on, and we know that striped bass are typically pretty stressed during that time of year,” said Colden.

Studies have shown that when water temperatures exceed 70 degrees in freshwater spawning grounds, the catch and release mortality for striped bass increases significantly, above the usual average of 9%, said McCrickard.

The board’s technical committee will begin reviewing Maryland’s proposal before meeting again in August to consider what regulatory options for 2026, if any, it wants to approve for public comment.

Members of the board and the public raised concerns at the meeting over the possible negative impacts that could result from lifting no-target protections currently in place in Maryland during the spring spawning period.

Public comments on the board’s options, which last year exceeded 4,000 submissions but ultimately didn’t spur any additional protections to the 2025 season, would take place between late August through September, according to Franke, before the board makes its final decision on the 2026 regulations in October.

The eyes and ears on the water

Fishery managers are hesitant to continue piling on regulations to a fishing community that they say as a whole provides many inherent benefits to striped bass recovery efforts.

Anglers are the eyes and ears on the water, monitoring the species on a regular basis, explained Gary. The information they provide is vitally important to fishery managers.

“When people are fishing, they care about the resource, and they’re going to be the best ones to spread the word to make sure people understand why we need good regulations that secure a promising future for the species,” Gary said.

Striped bass as a species are currently declared overfished, however there is no active overfishing occurring anymore, as a result of numerous regulatory actions taken by fishery managers after 2019.

Outside of regulating the fishery, angler education is another key to recovering striped bass stocks since usually about 90% of striped bass removals come from the recreational fishery.

McCrickard works to teach anglers about the best catch and release practices to give striped bass the best chance of survival after being released back into the waterway.

Anglers should always wet their hands before handling striped bass to protect the fish’s protective slime coating, said McCrickard.

Removing the fish from the water for an extended period is known to have negative impacts, so ideally a soft rubber net can be used to keep the fish in the water when preparing to remove the hook or take a photo, McCrickard said.

When releasing the fish, McCrickard advises facing them upright against the current and allowing them to swim out of your hands freely when they are ready.

“Lactic acid builds up in the muscles during the fight, and it’s essential for anglers to let the fish recover on their own terms when they are ready,” he said.

Swimming upstream

There are currently moratoriums effective in Virginia banning the catch and possession of river herring, American shad and Atlantic sturgeon, which are threatened, anadromous species similar to striped bass in that they spend their adult lives in saltwater but migrate to freshwater rivers and streams to spawn.

“The common theme here is that our native migratory fishes are all struggling; they’re all suffering; they’re all frankly imperilled,” Dunlap said.

Unfortunately there is not a single smoking gun that experts can blame for the declines. If there were, “we’d stand a lot better chance of having greater success for now by bolstering these species,” said Dunlap. “They’re definitely suffering a death by a thousand cuts here.”

Outside of climate change and overfishing, striped bass and migratory fishes in general are known to face losses as a result of unprotected water withdrawals.

“These industrial uses of the river could have the unfortunate capacity to suck in a tremendous amount of larval fish and fish eggs, removing them from that year class,” said Dunlap. “That can unfortunately be just a wrong place, right time issue on the river system.”

There is also increased sediment flowing into the Chesapeake Bay tributaries as a result of more violent and frequent precipitation events and an increase in impermeable land surfaces throughout the watershed.

“The sediment itself will have knock-on effects for the environment,” Dunlap explained, by burying aquatic vegetation, reducing the sunlight available for photosynthesis and changing the habitat for species that depend on it.

There are also habitat access issues as a result of the construction of dams and road culverts that block fish passage, as well as the understudied threat of a large invasive blue catfish population that feeds on and competes with native fish.

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