5-4-11: The Recovery and Decline of Maryland’s State Fish

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27090 PeltonEIF-0504.mp3

Fisheries scientist Bill Goldsborough (right) catching striped bass with host Tom Pelton (left).

Striped bass are often described as the Chesapeake Bay's greatest success story, with populations plummeting in the early 1980s and then rebounding because of a moratorium on fishing them from 1985 to 1989.  More recently, however, numbers of the iconic sport fish have been declining again, in part because their main food—a smaller fish called menhaden—is being overfished by industrial fleets out of Virginia.