A small number of female bass can restore the species even in years when the population is low; the problem is that a viable percentage of the young can no longer survive. Robert Pond, inventor of the “atom popper” lure (Cap’n Bill’s Bluefish Flash Bass Atom Popper #5 was my first and favorite), has invested his earnings in a research outfit called Stripers Unlimited, and has shown convincingly that, in Chesapeake headwaters, the buoyant striper eggs and larvae are devastatated by chemical assault. But Pond is convinced that federal biologists are slighting his research, in apparent deference to the chemical and agricultural industries, which (like the dairy and bread lobbies that undermined fish protein concentrate) strongly influence the federal bureaucracy.2
In consequence—and despite massive and evil-smelling evidence to the contrary—an absurd share of the blame for striped bass scarcity was still being ascribed to overfishing. This argument has some merit in the Chesapeake itself, where immature fish are taken in great quantity and adults are netted on the spawning grounds, but when applied to migrating fish along the coast, there is scarcely a reputable biologist who takes it seriously. In fact, few if any are convinced that management laws in effect since the 1930s have had any measurable effect.
“The existing sixteen-inch and eighteen-inch size limits and laws prohibiting netting in the Middle Atlantic and New England states do not appear to be of any benefit to the striped bass population, and it is quite evident that further restrictions in these states will have little or no effect on the abundance of the fish,” wrote John C. Poole of New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation in 1965,3 an opinion affirmed a few years later by the D.E.C.’s Dr. Richard Schaefer: “It seems extremely doubtful that New York fishermen have any measurable influence on the abundance of striped bass which occur seasonally along Long Island’s south shore. It also appears that effective management must be centered largely at the geographical source of the stocks.…”4
These opinions were written in the late sixties, when bass were plentiful, yet there seems small reason to quarrel with them now that bass are few, since it is clear that the drastic Chesapeake decline that recurred in the early seventies was caused less by fishing pressure on its migratory populations than by gross contamination of its tributaries.5 The larger tributaries include the bay’s ancestral river, the great Susquehanna (which descends from New York’s Finger Lakes and Mohawk Valley through Pennsylvania with half the Chesapeake’s supply of fresh water and a sour burden of both states’ industrial filth) as well as the seriously befouled James, Rappahannock, and Potomac. In the Hudson River, the bass population seemed more stable, yet the Hudson, too, had become so contaminated that in 1976 the sale of bass caught in the river was prohibited, because of the high level of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) found in these fish. New Jersey, too, forbade the sale of bass from Hudson waters. But efforts to clean up the Hudson were succeeding. The bass were increasing and the level of PCBs was going down, and it appeared that a healthy fishery could be restored.
Today spawning salmon are returning to the Connecticut River, ascending the river by fish ladders installed to carry them past the dams, and the adaptable striped bass, uninvited, is also ascending these salmon ladders, and has been observed in increasing numbers as far inland as the Vermont–New Hampshire border. It is thought that all the New England rivers once harbored Morone saxatilis, which could return to the Northeast, and prosper, with even the smallest encouragement from man. Yet in the crucial Chesapeake region, despite the pleas of Maryland biologists, the bureaucrats continued to avoid the issue, paying lip service to conservation while doing nothing to offend the local watermen.
Refusal to deal with the underlying problem was not confined to tidewater politicians. Even when the extent of mortality in bass eggs, larvae, and fingerlings became well known, the sportsmen’s lobbies paid little attention. Under one banner or another, in every coastal state from Maine to Texas, they were waging their crusades against “commercials,” thereby encouraging the impression that their actual intent was to reserve the more desirable fishes for themselves. In New York State, claiming to represent untold thousands of anguished voters, they continued to seek exclusive access to the disappearing bass without relinquishing the right to make money on their sport, soliciting endorsement from authentic conservation groups, as well as from bird and garden clubs, freshwater anglers, and others susceptible to the claim that the last of these beautiful striped silver fish would soon be dragged out of the sea by the horny hands of the insatiable netters. (The lobbies received very limited support from South Fork sportsmen who had seen commercial netting at first hand; from the start, the stronghold of the anti-netting lobbies has been up-Island, in the environs of Babylon.)
Throughout the late fifties and the sixties, good spawnings occurred every few years and bass were plentiful, and one bass bill after another was discredited as a conservation measure; in 1973 bass landings reached an all-time high because of the dominant year-class in the Chesapeake three years before. Therefore New York’s D.E.C. could not support the bass bills, which got nowhere, and biologists in the Chesapeake region generally agreed with the D.E.C. that restrictive legislation on the coastal fisheries was beside the point. The Natural Resources Institute of the University of Maryland observed in 1963 that “man’s fishing at the present intensity seems to have little effect on the long-range production of striped bass in Chesapeake Bay. The most essential long-range management measure to insure high spawning success is the protection, maintenance, and in some cases rehabilitation of the favorable environmental conditions in the important breeding and nursery areas.”6 Another biologist in the same institution drew attention in 1970 to the curious fact (cited earlier by Dr. Merriman) that as in the great year of 1934, “dominant year-classes often appear to be produced by smaller parental stocks.… That there is an inverse relationship between size of parent stock and recruitment (number of new fish produced by parent stock) is hardly to be questioned in the case of the Chesapeake Bay striped bass.”7 As late as 1978 Benjamin Florence of Maryland’s Division of Natural Resources, who would advocate a twenty-four-inch size limit for New York, acknowledged that “contrary to popular belief, prevention of overfishing will not guarantee increased reproduction or even necessarily benefit recruitment at all.… Remember that the failure of striped bass to produce a dominant year-class since 1970 is not a function of fishing, so how could the mere act of altering fishing practices solve the recruitment problem? It cannot, so fishermen must not be misled into believing that whatever restrictions they must endure will somehow automatically restore an abundance of stripers.”8
In 1978, in a good book called Striper, John Cole documented the destruction of the estuaries and predicted the immediate doom of the striped bass; and as it happened, a mediocre year-class that same year was the sole spawning after 1970 that slowed the decline of the Chesapeake race. Maryland biologists, finding one fingerling where in other years there had been thirty, advised all the Atlantic states that the 1978 hatch represented the last chance to restore the Chesapeake population, and a New York group called S.O.S. (Save our Stripers) lobbied for a bill to raise the size limit on bass from eighteen to twenty-six inches. Meanwhile, Perry Duryea, Montauk assemblyman and Republican minority leader, heretofore a staunch defender of the baymen, abandoned their cause in pursuit of his own ambition to be governor, and with Duryea abstaining from the fray, a bass bill won its first victory in the legislature. However, it was not endorsed by the D.E.C.’s Anthony Taormina, who had studied the bass since the 1950s and agreed with his colleagues that there was no biological justification for raising the limit above sixteen inches. When this fact was drawn to Governor Hugh Carey’s attention by an aide from East Hampton,9 the bill was vetoed and returned to the arena. However, the end of the half-century struggle was now in sight.
Meanwhile, the 1973 peak of fifteen million pounds in commercial landings had fallen steadily each year, to one third that amount by 1980. The market
value of the much-diminished catch had nearly doubled between 1970 and 1980, and the retail price soared from about one dollar to at least six dollars a pound as bass grew scarcer. In New York State, the 820,250 pounds taken in 1981 fell to 469,100 the following year, a “record low”; no attention was paid to the inconvenient fact that this record low was nearly four times higher than the highest figure in seventeen straight years between 1921 and 1938.
Predictably, sportsmen foresaw the “extinction” of an exceptionally tolerant species already successfully transplanted to the Pacific Coast and well established in freshwater habitats; and in response to this pumped-up emergency, a state-federal Striped Bass Management Plan, issued in 1981 by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, recommended an all-state twenty-four-inch limit, which, it was said, would enable adult females to return to the Chesapeake and spawn at least once before meeting their doom. (The question of how all this spawn would fare in a bath of poison was again ignored.) Biologists knew that an eighteen-inch limit, and probably a sixteen-inch limit, would accomplish the same purpose, and that an increase in numbers of adult fish would guarantee neither good spawning nor a good “recruitment,” which depended almost entirely on favorable conditions in the estuaries. However, the pressure to do something seemed insurmountable, so long as what was being done evaded the political consequences of a real solution to striped bass decline. Despite accumulating evidence that the last few netters on the migration route were probably the very least of the bass’s problems, the sportsmen showed little interest in a hard campaign to clean up the spawning rivers. Intent on winning their long feud with the commercial men, they pressed for restrictive legislation up and down the coast.
As Putnam McLean of the Sea Bright Fishing Company wrote in a letter to National Fisherman in August 1984: “The problems besetting striped bass: pollution, pollution, and pollution. The quick and easy solution is closure or limiting catches, but there is so much energy and publicity going into these solutions that the real culprit, destruction of spawning habitat, gets screened out. A lot of big toes are going to get stepped on when the real villain in the story finally emerges. Closures will help, but they should not be the major focus in solving the problem.”
The one point on which both sides could agree was that existing striped bass laws were self-defeating and unfair. Though laws vary widely throughout the Atlantic states, most northeastern states endorsed the twenty-four-inch rule, which was also in effect in coastal waters of all the Middle Atlantic states except Delaware and North Carolina, both of which permitted twelve-inch fish. But Maryland and Virginia, while supporting the twenty-four-inch rule along their ocean coasts (where there was no fishery) refused to admit that the thousands of miles of saltwater shoreline on the Chesapeake were “coast” as well; here the size limit was fourteen inches, despite widespread agreement among biologists that in taking fish of less than sixteen inches, the year of their fastest growth in weight was lost. In the period between 1954 and 1981, Maryland and Virginia accounted for more than 60 percent of the commercial catch on the entire Atlantic coast; an estimated 74 percent of this Chesapeake catch were immature fish of about fourteen inches. Yet neither state was doing anything of significance to reduce the harvest of immature and breeding bass, or to slow the destruction of the Chesapeake. Since small fish in New York and Rhode Island were apparently being saved to go back to the mid-Atlantic states to be netted, the last two northeastern states that permitted net fisheries for bass saw no point whatever in adopting the twenty-four-inch recommendation, despite the great pressure on their legislators from indignant sportsmen’s lobbies in Connecticut and Massachusetts.
The twenty-four-inch limit “would result in reductions of 33 to 82 percent in number and 9 to 42 percent by weight of commercial harvest and would have a major impact on the fishery,” the D.E.C.’s Taormina concluded in a staff report of February 1, 1982.10 (New York’s pound trap fishermen and gill netters catch small school bass up to twenty inches almost exclusively, and this is true also in Rhode Island, where in 1981, 92 percent of the bass taken were between sixteen and twenty-four inches; a Rhode Island gill netter reports that small bass bring in 80 percent of his income. As in New York, the netters believe that the striped bass wax and wane in cycles, and are not endangered. In the fall of 1981, Tallman and Mack, the Newport ocean pound trap firm that years ago bought their ocean traps and anchors from the Edwards Brothers, landed 130,000 pounds of bass—the third highest figure since the firm was established in 1910.) Nevertheless, in a recommendation issued just prior to his retirement from the D.E.C. in July 1982, Taormina endorsed a proposed raise in the size limit from sixteen to eighteen inches in recognition of low bass populations, noting in passing that his Marine Fisheries Division was under pressure to pay attention to “social and political, not just biological issues.” An eighteen-inch limit was officially endorsed by the D.E.C. at a hearing in Babylon in January 1983, and a bass bill favoring this limit was prepared for submission to the state senate in the spring.
But S.O.S. was still lobbying hard for the twenty-four-inch limit, and so was the New York Sportfishermen’s Federation, a noisy newcomer that claimed 35,000 members in its affiliated clubs. (This number is questioned, to put it politely, by the baymen, who believe that the federation actually represents that small group of commercial anglers who regularly make money on their catch.) These people also claimed the backing of sportsmen’s lobbies from all over New England, as well as motels, restaurants, tackle shops and manufacturers, garages, saloons, and other angler service operations, all of which, as the federation advised the politicians, would register their gratitude at the ballot box. This latest campaign, made more persuasive by the unquestionable decline of the striped bass, seems to have worked.
Assured by the sportsmen of support (that was not forthcoming) for a new saltwater sport-fishing license to fund their conservation operations—provided a new bass bill became law—the D.E.C. fell into line. On April 18, 1983, it officially endorsed a twenty-four-inch bill sponsored by a Babylon assemblyman named Patrick Halpin, who knew nothing at all about striped bass but needed some issues for his election campaign against Suffolk County Supervisor Peter Cohalan. The sudden D.E.C. decision to ignore Taormina’s long experience was ascribed to his young successor, Gordon Colvin, who blamed it in turn on poor bass landings in 1982 as well as his personal eagerness to comply with the state-federal recommendation. No one consulted with the baymen, although the D.E.C. admitted that the twenty-four-inch law would have about five times more impact on the netters than on the sportsmen; the small striped bass between sixteen and twenty inches, used for fillets by markets and restaurants, is the “money fish” of gill-netters, trap fisherman, and haul-seiners alike, without which a bass fishery could not survive.
In a letter to the East Hampton Baymen’s Association after the D.E.C. decision, Mr. Taormina declared that the poor landings of the year before were “still well within the historical norm” (again, the highest yield of bass for any year between 1921 and 1938 was about one fourth of the 1982 “low”) and a leading bass biologist, Dr. J. L. McHugh of the Marine Sciences Research Center of New York State University at Stony Brook, agreed with him. Dr. McHugh, who has made a study of bass population dynamics for the half century since 1933, believes that the general level of abundance of bass in New York State has decidedly increased over that period, despite the evident deterioration of the Chesapeake spawning grounds and despite the present low point in its cycles. Similarly, D.E.C. biologist Byron Young, who has been sampling the small bass taken in the East End nets and traps for over a decade, has indicated to the netters from the start that the twenty-four-inch limit would accomplish almost nothing. (Young knows as well as anyone what a small harvest of the coastal schools the haul seines take. A few years ago at Montauk,11 when he released twenty tagged bass into a net already set by the Havens crew, all but three of the enclosed fish escaped during the hauling.)
Not surprisingly, the Fulton
Fish Market (which controls 80 percent of the eastern sales of striped bass) denounced the bill, inspiring Salt Water Sportsman (May 1983) to warn state legislators not to be intimidated by “mob pressure.” The Montauk Boatmen’s Association, which represents the charter men, called the ruling unfair and unenforceable—there was nothing to stop boat anglers from coming ashore with bass fillets instead of bass. Also, the ruling was very bad for business: about four million dollars worth of boat-caught bass are shipped to market in an average year from Montauk, in addition to all the stripers taken home. But the politicians perceived a sportsmen’s constituency for the 1983 elections, and Halpin dutifully repeated the sportsmen’s notion that the striped bass was “facing extinction.” To harassed Long Island legislators, sick of the controversy and ever alert to the next election, it must have seemed quicker and easier to turn their backs on a hundred-odd baymen than to take on the powerful sportsmen’s lobbies, not to speak of big industries on the Susquehanna and the Hudson, which were protected by the legislators from upstate.
In May 1983, at an antinuclear rally on East Hampton Green, I discussed the latest bass bill with Baymen’s Association officers Dan King, Don Eames, Jr., and Arnold Leo. The men felt frustrated and uneasy. Early this year they had been persuaded by friendly legislators in Albany that the baymen had better go along with an eighteen-inch bill if they wanted to avoid something worse. At a baymen’s meeting, the membership had accepted this advice, all but two trappers who insisted that an eighteen-inch law was unacceptable, that a bass bill had never passed before and would not pass this time either. Their stubbornness had turned the vote, said Donnie Eames, disgusted. “What’s the sense of sendin us to Albany if they don’t listen to us when we get back?”