Protect bunker, protect the food web
Menhaden feed striped bass, ospreys and other coastal predators. Food-stress research and missed ecosystem targets make a strong case for precautionary protection.
5 min read
Forage
14 posts on forage.
You might not know this fish. Stripers do.
Follow a little marsh fish through the tide, habitat loss and a New Jersey restoration. Mummichogs connect overlooked feeding grounds to striped bass, but their story is local, not a proven coastwide collapse.
6 min read
Stripers eat herring, but which herring depends on the month
Yes, but it matters which herring and when. In Massachusetts stomach studies, Atlantic herring were an early-summer meal for young bass north of Boston and nearly gone from their stomachs by August. River herring (alewife and blueback) were about 1 percent of the summer diet coast-wide, and much more than that in the rivers they run up.
5 min read
Stripers eat shrimp, and in early summer the estuary school fish live on it
Yes. In Massachusetts stomach studies the sand shrimp was one of the most common things a striped bass had eaten, about one prey item in five north of Cape Cod. It mattered most to 15- to 19-inch school fish in estuaries in early summer, and almost not at all to big bass on the rocks.
5 min read
Stripers eat eels. Massachusetts stomachs almost never show it.
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
Stripers eat squid, mostly the big ones south of the Cape
Yes, but less than the squid-run stories suggest. In Massachusetts stomach studies, squid and their relatives made up 1 to 3.4 percent of a striped bass's summer diet by weight. The exception was big bass in open water in Nantucket Sound, where it was 18 percent.
5 min read
The rain bite has never been measured. A flood has.
No study has measured whether striped bass bite better during or after an ordinary rain. What has been measured is a flood that sent tagged Hudson River bass out of the estuary for months, and young herring that leave their home streams in short pulses that rain and rising water can set off.
5 min read
Stripers eat crabs, and the big ones eat more of them
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
An onshore breeze moves the water. It cannot carry the bunker.
An onshore wind really does move the top of the water toward the beach, but at a few percent of the wind's speed, slower than a feeding bunker school cruises. We found no study of striped bass feeding against wind direction, and good surfcasters disagree about the rule. What holds up is the surf the wind builds on your own beach.
5 min read
A 43-inch bass with a 3.3-inch bunker in it
"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
More bait is not more bites. The fish you catch is the hungry one.
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
Bunker is an autumn bait. The stomach data is not subtle about it.
Striped bass stomachs sampled off Massachusetts contained zero menhaden in June and July, then 29 to 81 percent by weight in August and September. Here is what that means for when bunker is the bait.
3 min read
Your sand eel fly is imitating an animal that is, at 2am, under the sand
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
The herring run is not a date. It is 9 degrees.
Alewife start running at about 9°C, and river herring runs are over by about 20–21°C. Across twelve Massachusetts streams the northern runs go later, warmer and in a narrower window than the southern ones — so a single statewide date is wrong by construction.
3 min read