By Richard Gaines
GLOUCESTER — About now, the first small bass carrying sea lice have arrived from their winter grounds and brackish nurseries in the great rivers of the middle Atlantic states — the Hudson, the Delaware and the Chesapeake.
Fish without the lice caught now or even earlier probably wintered over, as stripers are known to do. The lice tends to get picked up along the ocean interstate.
Gary Nelson, a senior marine fisheries biologist with the Division of Marine Fisheries, said preliminary research suggests that the fish arriving from those starting points might actually be returning from last year.
That striped bass are more than random visitors here or anywhere would be big news, for it means they have the capacity to navigate hundreds of miles along the southern New England coast and find the waters of past summers.
Martha Mather, a striped bass fisherman and research associate professor at the University of Massachusetts, said an incomplete study has produced an encouraging snippet of evidence that stripers do come back. She described it as a "small piece of information" based on acoustic tagging from 2005 to 2006.
"Some come back," she said. "We don't know how many."
She said the evidence comes from the tagging of 60 schoolie striped bass from 16 to 18 inches long in Plum Island Sound. Of the 14 that were tagged in 2005, nine were known to be back in the same waters in 2006.
"Only two stayed for a prolonged period," she said.
What happened to the rest is not known.
"Either the batteries died or they moved on," she said.
They were not holdovers, she noted, because the study tracked "some" to winter waters of Delaware Bay and others to the Hudson River.
Mather said she was surprised to find that stripers can and do return to summer waters.
"Five years ago, I didn't think that was possible," she said. "There's no genetic connection. But we're thinking that's not a completely harebrained idea. But we can't explain any reason why a fish would do that."
She said that with new, longer-life batteries, definitive conclusions should be available in five years.
In the meantime, the wonder that stripers of any kind, wanderers or returnees, frequent these or any coastal New England waters should be not been missed — signs that good conservation can make a powerful difference are always welcome.
By the end of the 1970s, the striped bass, once so common along the shoreline that it was considered a fertilizer fish to the original settlers, was on the verge of extinction, victimized by indiscriminate fishing of bass and industrial pollution of the spawning grounds in the mid-Atlantic rivers.
The improvement of the quality of the water in the Hudson, Delaware and Chesapeake and size limits and the new catch-and-release ethos has generated a revival of historic proportions.
The catches each year have grown on records from the past until, as Nelson said yesterday, the peak concentration may have passed.
"There are indications that numbers are declining slightly," he said. "We won't see higher abundances."
There are "limits" to what the ecosystem can support, he noted.
