Salinity Effect On Stripers

[Fish Bait]

I’ve been puzzled by the absence of stripers at the Tank. Conventional wisdom is that the cause is decreased salinity due to increased rain. The salinity at the tank for this month is 10.5 ppt.
In contrast to the Tank, striper fishing has been good this summer on the Susquehanna flats where the salinity is 0.47 ppt. Also Stripers are regularly caught at Fletchers boathouse, which is virtually fresh water.
There must be some factor, in addition to salinity, to account for the poor showing of stripers at the Tank.
Can anyone explain this?

Puzzled in Frederick,

[Timberfish]

More variables come into play than salinity... the biggest and often most important is DOC dissolved oxygen content... sedimentation effects this as does temperature. with increases in both you get decreases in oxygen in the water. This is why you are not seeing many stripers traveling as far up the choptank as you may think should be there. Just like us they won't go were they can't breath... this is why you will find pleny of cats in the tank though... they have a lower threshold then more pelagic (open water) fish i.e. stripers, blues, sea trout... I hope this shed some scientific light on the problem of the tank....

[sand flea]

Another problem is that early rains this year swept huge about of nitrogenous waste--basically fertilizer--into the bay. That fertilizer causes algae blooms, which were then consumed by bacteria, which ate up the oxygen.

Dead zones were created and the fish disappeared.

Stripers can tolerate fresh and saltwater, but all that rain really wrecked things.

[Fish Bait]

Thanks both for the explanations.

[Lipyourown]

Sandflea, how can we get Greenpeace to focus on the fertilizer & sewage like they are with the Menhadden?

[Timberfish]

Yes... blooms have also caused to the depletion of the DOC in the tank... but that is the issue. No oxygen no fish. Has a lot less to do with salinity.

Now to address how do you get organizations to change focus or raise the issues? Tell them!!! You have to write to them. Tell them the stuff you care about and get involved. Also it never hurts to tell your representatives... To many fisherman... talk about the issues, and actually are very knowledgable as well, but relatively very few take the action to influence change. If everyone that fishes, which is a ton of people by the way, wrote to their representatives that water quality is a critical issue to them we would see more attention being paid.

Hey democracy works.... you just have to make yourself heard. All of us.. or they don't know we care.

[Lipyourown]

I hear ya, I donate to some groups and let em know how I feel and occasionally even write politicians. I don't think they take me seriously as I am a lone writer without much of a voice. There seems to be alot more in the news about bad water in the Bay than overfishing Menhadden in the Bay so....I just wondered aloud to Sandflea "how can we get GP to address the bad water too" since they really do get the ear of politicians etc. Hell, cleaner water will also help the Menhadden.