The colors a striped bass's eye is built for are green and orange: it has two kinds of cone cell, one tuned to green and one to orange, and in daylight it keeps responding well into the red, further than the other Chesapeake predators it was tested against. No cone tuned to blue has turned up. That is the equipment for color vision. Whether a striped bass uses it to judge a lure has not been tested. The closest test, on a different fish with nearly the same eye, says color is real for that fish but narrower than yours: by sight alone it could not tell chartreuse from white.
It sees at night too, just differently. Measured by day and by night, the striped bass eye needed roughly forty times less light after dark to reach a half-strength response, and its color response slid toward blue-green. Color lives in the cones, and the cones are the cells that need the most light. After dark, think contrast and silhouette.
Whether they feed more at night is a separate question, and nobody has measured it.
What is inside the eye
Miller and Korenbrot (1993) recorded striped bass retina cells one at a time. The rods, the dim-light cells, respond best at 528 nanometers, a green. The single cones peak at 542, also green. The twin cones, pairs of cells wired together, peak at 605, an orange.
The rods reach half-strength on an eighth of the light the single cones need, and a fiftieth of what most twin cones need. Those twin cones respond faster: 50 milliseconds to peak, against 86 for the single cones. Neither this work nor the study below turned up a cone tuned to blue or ultraviolet.
Four predators, one test
In 2010 a team at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science recorded how the whole living eye responds to light in four species that hunt Chesapeake Bay, by day and by night, after at least half an hour in darkness each time (Horodysky and colleagues).
| Striped bass | Bluefish | Cobia | Summer flounder | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visual pigments (best fit) | 2: green, orange | 4: violet to green | 1: blue-green | 2: blue, green |
| Sensitivity in daylight | Lowest | Low | Low | Highest |
| Gain in sensitivity at night | About 40× | About 7× | About 2.5× | None |
| Fastest flicker it followed | Highest, with cobia | Middle | Highest, with striped bass | Lowest |
Three things stand out. By day it is a bright-light eye: it needed about ten times more light than bluefish or cobia to follow a flicker equally well, yet in full light it followed flicker as fast as any of them, in a range the authors compare to tunas. It alone kept responding strongly past 650 nanometers, into the red. And it changed most at night, when the flicker it could follow also dropped.
The authors call it a daytime-active hunter with fast vision for fast prey in well-lit water, gaining sensitivity at night "presumably at the expense of acuity." Their fish were small, none over about a pound and a half. A 30-pound fish's eye was not tested.
Which lure colors can they tell apart?
Two cone types are the hardware for color, not proof of it. Proof takes a behavior test: train a fish to a color, then see whether it can pick that color out of a line-up of grays. We could find no such test on striped bass.
The nearest one used largemouth bass, which are no close relation but carry almost the same retina: rods at 528, green cones at 535, orange-red cones at 614, no blue cone (Mitchem and colleagues, 2019). Young fish trained with food picked out red and green reliably, even from a line-up of grays, so they do see color. Without scent to help, they could not tell chartreuse from white, or blue from black.
If striped bass work the same way (their pigments suggest they might; it is untested), chartreuse would look much like white to them, and blue much like black. You may have read that a Virginia study proved yellow and chartreuse are what striped bass see best, night or day. It measured an eye, not a lure, and at night that eye shifted away from yellow, toward blue-green.
The water edits all of it. The same Virginia paper notes that coastal water carries green light furthest and estuary water carries yellow to red. A color reaches the fish only if the water lets it through.
After dark, and in dirty water
At night the eye leans on its rods, and there is only one kind of rod. Color comes from comparing two cone types, so a rod-lit view is mostly brightness and shape: the physiological case for choosing a night lure by how its profile stands out rather than by its hue. The eye also slows after dark, which fits the old advice to slow the retrieve. Fits it; does not prove it.
Dirty water pulls the same lever. The Virginia authors conclude that striped bass eyes need bright light to work at their best and should be at a disadvantage in water made highly turbid by people. Less light reaching the fish means less color reaching it.
Do they feed more at night?
Nobody knows. We can find no study that has measured how much adult striped bass eat by hour of the day. A study of 797 striped bass from 13 Massachusetts estuaries sampled only in the first four hours of light on the ebb, and says it had no estimate of when, over the day, striped bass feed (Ferry and Mather, 2012).
What has been measured is where tagged fish go and how busy they are, and it changes with the place:
| Where | What the fish did |
|---|---|
| Herring River tide gate, Wellfleet, spring herring run | More than twice as active at night as by day, peaking at dawn and dusk (Rillahan and colleagues, 2021) |
| Minas Passage, Bay of Fundy, winter | Deeper by day, shallower at night, by an amount that tracked water temperature; no pattern below 1 °C (Keyser and colleagues, 2016) |
None of these measured eating. Fish busier at night below a gate where migrating herring are held up tell you about that gate, not about every night everywhere.
How StripedLines uses this
StripedLines is built for striped bass. The app's What to Use advice suggests a dark lure after dark and natural colors by day, and at night says color is debated: try light, dark and loud.