Some good news on Striped Bass

[HESH2]

all my catch and release are made standing in surf,barbless hooks,mostly schoolies.fish not picked totally out of water,all lip grabbed by me.during course of year maybe 3 bleeders out of all fish released.a bleeding fish is a dead fish.recs release mortality rate seems high to me.

[Squidhound]

Rec fishing mortality will always be a best guess type of thing. There was a very interesting study I ran across on the internet a couple years ago, where they actually had a bunch of guys catching bass tagging them and holding them in a large pen for several days, in an effort to get an idea of delayed mortality and the relationship between gut hooked fish and release mortality. They tracked alot of details and variables, the part of the study that surprised me was the fish dieing hours to days after being released. The idea that just because it swam away in a healthy angry and vigorous manner didn't necesarrily mean it was going to live. I feel I do a pretty good job treating a bass nice and letting it swim away (when I don't keep it) but after seeing this study I ended up feeling any gut hooked fish's odds weren't quite as good as I had thought they were previously.

Anyways, does this study ring a bell with anyone here? I just went looking for it briefly and didn't find it, but it really is one of the most interesting examples of data collection on this topic that I have seen.

[DZ]

Squidhound,
Here are a few links to some studies. They may be what your looking for.


http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/fish_mari...report2003.pdf

http://www.dnr.maryland.gov/fisherie...port/crsb.html

http://www.dnr.state.md.us/fisheries...yresearch.html


DZ

[Squidhound]

DZ - Thanks, I'm pretty sure it's the middle one that I was thinking of.

There's alot of very interesting data in there.

For example
-The deep hooking mortality rate for striped bass caught with conventional bait hooks in this study was 53.1%.

-The deep hooking mortality rate with non-offset circle hooks was 23.5%.

- Overall, 9.1% of the striped bass caught on conventional hooks died whereas only 0.8% of the fish caught on circle hooks died.

It's also interesting to see the data on temperature effecting survival.