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Jenn, it is a vicious cycle of what came first, the chicken or the egg. In general, the northern states push for the southern states to preserve the small fish so they'll grow and we'll have more bigger fish and the southern states say that we take too many bigger fish so that when they can't breed as many small fish, they have less available to them...
In New England, we get alot of our fish migrating from the Chessapeke/North Carolina areas and some from the Hudson River. When the Chessapeke fish get big enough to migrate (2-3 years or older) and the females old enough to spawn (typically 5-7 years and older) they tend to spend the late spring, summer, and early fall in our northern waters. The smaller fish tend to stay in the Maryland and Virginia bays. Those are the fish the people down there go for in the bulk of their season. The limits are usually broken down between the northern, coastal states, and the Del/Mar/Va area where a good percentage of stripers are born. Alot of the non-commercial fisherman up north have been pushing for higher minimum lengths so that theoretically, more females will be released, live, and spawn more baby bass to eventually grow and so-on-so-forth, yada-yada-yada.
Several years ago, after many years of strict limits the striped bass was considered recovered and the floodgates were opened on the harvest of these fish. After just a few years there were alot of warnings, some true and some false, that the fish were getting hit pretty hard. That time is now and that is why alot of us have been pushing for higher minimum limits and with slot limits in some states. Even if it is just better to be safe than sorry as fishery management is far more prone to screw up a resource than to protect it.
Understandably, we get a little tweaked when they drop the minimum size limits instead of the status quo of last year or raising the minimums like many anglers had hoped for. Alot of anglers are hoping that the minimums will stay on the high side to help protect the numbers of fish, so more and more will have a chance to spawn and that there will be no "collapse" of the striped bass stocks again...
This doesn't even touch the commercial -v- recreational debate or the food supply -v- size of fish and all the other "stock management" topics that get everyone all up in arms too... :P
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