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Striped Bass - The Founding Father of Delta Fish Monitoring
  • August 13, 2024
Striped bass fish sitting on a metal deck of a fishing vessel. CDFW image.

By Rosemary Hartman

Pop quiz – what are the three longest-running monitoring programs in Sacramento Delta? The Summer Townet Survey started in 1959 to monitor young-of-year striped bass, the Fall Midwater Trawl survey started in 1967 to monitor juvenile striped bass after the Summer Townet finished for the year, and the Adult Striped Bass Survey started in 1969 to monitor adult striped bass (males reach sexual maturity at 2 to 4 years old, when they are about 11 inches long, and females at 4 to 8 years old, when they are 21-25 inches long). Data from Summer Townet and Fall Midwater Trawl have been used for tons of other projects, and are now used to monitor many species of native and non-native pelagic fish (Kimmerer 2002, Mac Nally et al. 2010, Sommer et al. 2011, Bever et al. 2016, Mahardja et al. 2021, Smith et al. 2021, Tempel et al. 2021), but not many people know about the Adult Striped Bass Dataset – and it’s just recently been published online (Stompe and Hobbs 2024)!

Why has so much of the monitoring in the Delta started for striped bass? Well, the striped bass – Morone saxatilis – was introduced into the Sacramento River in 1879 (Stevens et al. 1987) and is a popular sport fish. It originally came from the East Coast of North America, where it was a food source for the Indigenous people of the region and has been a favorite of fishermen after colonization as well. Overfishing has caused a decline in abundance on the East Coast (though the fishing rate has been reduced to better manage the stock)(Richards and Rago 1999, Fabrizio et al. 2017), but how are they doing in California?

The young-of-the-year fish picked up in the Summer Townet and Fall Midwater Trawl have declined a lot since the 1980s, with a particularly sharp downturn in the early 2000s (Sommer et al. 2007), though they have not declined as sharply as native pelagic fishes (Mac Nally et al. 2010, Nobriga and Smith 2020).

Line chart showing the annual abundance index of young-of-year striped bass as calculated by the Summer Townet Survey and Fall Midwater Trawl. Both surveys' estimates decline in abundance between 1970-200.

Figure 1. Population index for young-of-year striped bass in the Fall Midwater Trawl (FMWT) and Summer Townet (STN) from 1959-2023. Black circles and solid lines are FMWT index, dashed blue lines and triangles are STN index.

The adult striped bass data are a little harder to work with. There have been a lot of changes over the course of the survey, so comparing the data from 1970 to that of 2020 isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. Analyses of the adult striped bass survey data from 1985 showed that the adult population had declined by 75% from 1970 to 1982, with droughts, overfishing, lower food supplies, contaminants, and water diversions implicated in the decline (Stevens et al. 1985) . Extending this analysis through 1995 revealed the decline continued, with food limitation partially to blame (Kimmerer et al. 2000, Lindley and Mohr 2003), but the population recovered somewhat in the late 1990s (Loboschefsky et al. 2012), probably because of the string of wet years, and numbers of age-3 fish in the early 2000s were higher than would be predicted from the age-0 trawl surveys in recent years (Nobriga and Smith 2020).

(A) Shows a bar chart showing abundance of striped bass by age over time. Total abundance decreased from 1969-1995, then increased until 2000, decreasing through 2004. (B) Shows a graph of the increase in the ratio of age-3 striped bass abundance to the FMWT abundance three years prior.

Figure 2. A) Adult striped bass population estimates from 1969-2004. Reproduced from Loboschefsky et al. 2012, with permission. B) ratio of age 3 adult striped bass to the fall midwater trawl index from three years prior. Reproduced from Nobriga and Smith 2020, with permission.

Looking at more recent data, we can’t calculate abundance in the same way. The older datasets used to use the Bay-Delta Creel Survey to recapture tagged fish, and that program stopped in the early 2000s. However, we can still pick up a few basic trends. First of all, the average length of the fish has declined over time (Figure 3). This is common in populations where the larger fish are removed from the population by fishing (Law 2000). There is often selective pressure to mature at a smaller size to make sure they reproduce before being caught by a fisherman. This hasn’t been studied specifically in California striped bass, but it might be part of the reason behind the change in size. Another factor contributing to the decreased size of fish is the decreasing proportion of female striped bass in the catch. There are always more male fish than female fish, but the percentage of female fish has been declining over time (Figure 4). Why? We don’t really know, but capture of larger fish might be part of the story.

Line graph showing the decrease in striped bass length over time

Figure 3. Average fork length of all striped bass caught by the Adult Striped Bass Survey from 1969 to 2022. Green area represents the standard deviation in length, and black line shows the trend.

Graph showing percentage of male and female striped bass caught over time. The percentage of female striped bass has decreased from about 40% in 1970 to about 5% in 2022.

Figure 4. Percent of annual striped bass catch that are male or female over time from 1969-2022.

We do know that female fish are always bigger than male fish – even at the same age. You can see with the trend line in Figure 5 that when they are young – two or three years old – they are about the same size. However, by age four females are a bit larger, and by age 6 females are consistently 8-12 cm (2-4 inches) larger than males, on average. This is pretty common in fish, since females need more resources to produce eggs (Parker 1992). It's possible that the larger females are being taken by fishermen at a higher rate, which may cause the change in sex ratios.

Scatter plot showing striped bass length versus age for both male and female fish. Male fish are always slightly smaller than female fish.

Figure 5. Fork length of all fish caught by the adult striped bass survey versus age (as determined from scales) for female fish (pink circles and solid pink line) and males (blue triangles and dashed blue line).

While we can’t calculate abundance indices like the ones used in the first part of the project’s history, we can determine the number of fish caught per hour in our fish traps. Since we began tracking how much effort is being spent on fishing, we’ve seen a slight increase in number of adult striped bass (Figure 6), but it’s highly variable, and may be due to changes in sampling methods and locations. However, the survey tagged less fish in later years, and we have seen a decline in the number of tagged fish that we’ve recaptured (Figure 7). We use the number of fish we've tagged and the number we've recaptured to estimate population size, but due to a reduction in funding and changes to management, we no longer have enough recaptures for accurate population estimates. Despite the changes, the sport fish monitoring programs have provided valuable insights into Delta’s ecology and the role of striped bass within it.

Plot showing catch per unit effort of striped bass in fyke traps from 1996 to 2019 with a line of best fit showing a small increase over time.

Figure 6. Catch per unit effort of striped bass in the fyke trap on the Sacramento River from 1994-2022, within linear fit line shown in blue.

Line plot showing that the percent of tagged striped bass recaptured over time from 1969-2022. Percent recaptured has been decreasing from 1983-2021.

Figure 7. Percentage of tagged fish recaptured per year from 1969 to 2022 with trend line shown in blue.

References and further reading

Categories: Underappreciated data
Tagged: Striped BassMorone saxitilisunerappreciated datamark-recapturesize distributionoverfishing

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