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When Dale Scullion started his fishing guide business in Quebec City 15 years ago, there wasn't a single striped bass to be hooked in the St. Lawrence River.
Nowadays, he said anglers could easily spend the day reeling them in without any special gear.
"Even a grandma, 90 years old, could catch one," Scullion says.
Striped bass, also called stripers or rockfish, were once declared extinct in the St. Lawrence River, and even though the fish appears to be abundant these days, they are strictly protected under the Species at Risk Act, so intentionally catching them is illegal. |
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But those regulations may be loosened sooner than expected. An official reassessment is taking place in November — three years earlier than planned.
Lifting the ban on catching stripers could be a boon to the sport fishing industry, as the fish, which typically weighs in at nine to 18 kilograms when mature, has been known to lure in anglers from far afield.
This is already the case in the Gaspé Peninsula, where fishermen visit in droves with the hope of landing a trophy striper in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Gone for 40 years
The Atlantic striped bass is found all along the east coast of North America. Quebec is its northernmost habitat. A separate but related fish, called the Gulf Coast striped bass, is found in the Gulf of Mexico.
However, the predatory fish with the tell-tale dark horizontal stripes on its metallic sides disappeared from the St. Lawrence for 40 years, due to overfishing and habitat destruction during the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway in the 1950s. |
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