|
interesting..
i was just reading the study about striped bass feeding habits in mass..
it concludes that they rarely eat mackerel.. from hingham upwards had the highest concentration of mackerel in stomachs with a frequency of occurrence at 1.5 percent. mean while that same number for bunker was 21.2
that's quite a large difference. of course the macks have been far and few between since june (or atleast from i see and hear) compared to the bunkers being every where.
another interesting note is 55% of the diet was crustaceans. i didn't think it was that big a part of the diet.
the numbers compared to those above are 19.7 for rock crabs and 19.3 for sand shrimp. and 11 for the green crab. they also feed more heavily on lobsters than they do on mackerel at 8.9.
nothing else came close to those numbers.. so mackerel are not a big food for stripers.. they seem to be a prey of opportunity. where as they seem actively hunt down bunker.
another interesting thing.. during june and july bunker had next to nothing to do with food for bass. percentage wise. the diet was mostly crustacean.
which would explain why my buddy and i had tons of fish on clams and people pluggin got skunked more often.
the once august hits that it reverses back to a fish diet. mostly bunker. to the point where nothing else even matters.
the most interesting thing i saw was.. the larger fishes' diet was dominated by lobsters all season and the schoolies fed more on bunker.
of course this is from hingham upwards. i haven bothered trying to make sense of the capes report. which isn't much different.
it was a very interesting read if you can make sense of it. it basically concludes that the larger the bass the less fish they eat.
with that said.. i will be changing my tactics up immediately. now where can i get my hands on those hogy lobsters? i need them ASAP!
|