Relationship between salinity and striper populations

[sand flea]

I lifted this from a post I made on the Maryland board. Given the popularity of striped bass on the East Coast, I wanted everyone to see what I stumbled across. It looks like the rosetta stone for striper populations.
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Well, I just found the answer. While we all got hung up on how last year's flooding screwed everything up with too much rain, turns out droughts are even worse.

Look at this young of year (YOY) graph from the DNR, indicating striper spawns.

<img src="http://www.pierandsurf.com/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=440&d=1144604995">

Now compare it to this document (http://md.water.usgs.gov/drought/drought_md.html) on historic droughts. They sync up exactly. Droughts=crap conditions for stripers. Remember the 2002 drought? Look what it did to spawns.

Inversely, look at the good years. 1996, for instance, had historic spawns. It also included an historic flood (http://md.water.usgs.gov/floods/#JAN96). And let's not forget the record snows of 2003, which were followed by heavy flooding into June. Look at the YOY for that year.

(I love doing this kind of research :) )

[Digger]

Also remember what is good for one spieces may be bad for another. But yes there are direct coralations out there. Ah I need to do some mining of data I forgot about.

[sand flea]

Digger, off the top of my head, the relationship seems to be inverse for reds. I'm doing some digging right now.

I'd also like to ge ahold of citation data and not just YOY indexes, but it's tough to find more than a couple of years back.

Another thing is that there are certainly other factors at play here. Availability of forage, overfishing (the stripers were nearly wiped out in the 80's) and other things come into play. But when I compared the YOY striper data to droughts and floods, it about knocked me over.

[Newsjeff]

Sound like more info for your book, Matt.

Good stuff.

[Digger]

The citation info is on the VMRC website I believe.

http://www.mrc.state.va.us/vswft/index.shtm

has the links.

Now what I want is the raw tagging info not just the returns.

[Digger]

Here is something else if intrest.

http://www.mrc.state.va.us/stocktables.shtm