12 posts on behavior.
Yes. Young striped bass in a lab told one creek's water from another's by smell, and striped bass in tanks ate more of a feed laced with amino acids and two other compounds. What no one has measured is the part anglers argue about, how far a big striper can smell your bait, or whether it will follow the scent to it.
5 min read
Yes, striped bass eat American eels, but in 1,720 Massachusetts stomachs with food, eel turned up only in Nantucket Sound, at half a percent of the diet by weight. The surveys ran on summer mornings, and eels head for the sea mostly at night, mostly in fall. A live eel's record on the hook says more about the bait than about the menu.
5 min read
Yes, and plenty of them. In Massachusetts stomach studies, crustaceans, mostly crabs, small lobsters and sand shrimp, were a third to half of a striped bass's summer diet by weight. Rock crab led on the North Shore, lady crab in Nantucket Sound. And the biggest bass leaned on the bottom hardest.
5 min read
Yes. Striped bass have cones tuned to green and to orange, and their eyes respond well into the red. But it is a bright-light eye that retunes after dark, becoming about 40 times more sensitive and shifting toward blue-green. Whether they feed more at night has not been measured.
5 min read
Tagged stripers that summer in Massachusetts spend the winter far to the south, off Virginia and on the Maryland shelf, with North Carolina a known wintering ground. Not every fish goes. Some stay in their home rivers year-round, and a Maine river has a documented group that winters there.
5 min read
A 1975 lab study measured juvenile striped bass turning to face moving water more often as velocity rose. Guides and surfcasters have been reading the same behavior in rips, at bridges, and around boulders for generations — here's the mechanism, and what it changes about where you cast.
7 min read
Wild brown trout spend 86% of their foraging time sitting still beside fast water, and the lab has measured what that buys them — including the finding that at high flow the cheapest place to hold was in front of the rock, not behind it. Here is what that teaches about holding water on the coast.
6 min read
"Big bait, big fish" is the most repeated rule in striper fishing. In 241 Massachusetts stomachs with measurable menhaden, the length of the bass explains 2 percent of the variation in the length of the menhaden it ate. In the Chesapeake, the largest fish lean on bay anchovies. Big bass widen the range they will eat — they do not leave the bottom of it.
6 min read
Feeding-response curves for northeast piscivores flatten out exactly where bait is thickest, fish collected by angling had eaten less than fish collected by nets, and in summer water a young striped bass's stomach is half-empty again in roughly one tide stage. "Find the bait" tells you where to stand — it is a poor forecast of the catching.
6 min read
The idea that a hooked fish releases something that shuts down the rest comes from carp and minnows. Striped bass are not in that lineage and have no known equivalent. That is not permission to be sloppy: fish watch each other, and in carp, fish that saw a catch-and-release stayed hook-shy for hours.
3 min read
Sand lance feeding is maximal between 100 and 1,000 lux and nearly stops at 1. In the dark they are not swimming badly — they are fully buried in the seabed. Three lab papers from 1974 say so, and it changes what you should be throwing after dark.
3 min read
There is no primary study of barometric pressure and striped bass. The studies that do exist are freshwater work on other fish in lakes, and the best-controlled of them found nothing. Two studies widely quoted for the rule do not exist at the sources given, and the best-attested coastal result has predators leaving ahead of a drop rather than feeding.
3 min read
