| Outdoors Trying to Solve Mysteries of Striped Bass in Winter | |
| By John Waldman |
Source: nytimes |
4/7/2007 |
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Fishermen and scientists may never fully understand the striped bass, but they will never stop trying. Few fish have been studied as much as the striped bass has between spring and fall. Its wintering biology, however, is less understood.
During autumn, stripers entertain anglers as they migrate south from New England. Large individuals then winter in ocean waters, but many of their smaller counterparts, known as schoolies, travel to major estuaries that support striped bass spawning, namely the Hudson and Delaware Rivers and the Chesapeake Bay. |
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Some, however, ride out the cold months in systems where they do not reproduce, including the Housatonic and Connecticut Rivers in Connecticut and Scortons Creek on Cape Cod. Judging from fishermen’s catches, none of these hold anywhere near the sheer numbers of the upper Thames River in Connecticut, home to an unusual aggregation of wintering striped bass long known to fishermen but not to scientists.
Mike Bednarski, a Queens College graduate student and an avid angler, tried to tackle this striped bass riddle. |
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