“The Striped Bass Morone saxatilis is one of the most sought-after recreational fish species along the US Atlantic coast. Regulations and a strong conservation ethic among anglers make Striped Bass among the most frequently released coastal marine fishes. A recent rule requires anglers to use circle hooks when targeting Striped Bass with natural baits, yet the conservation benefit of this action remains unclear.”
“In conclusion, we did not find a significant reduction in postrelease mortality for Striped Bass that were captured via three different sizes of commonly used circle hooks. This suggests that the validity of the coastwide mandate requiring recreational anglers to use only circle hooks when baitfishing for Striped Bass can be questioned. However, it is important to consider that this regulation also prevents anglers from using baited treble hooks, which was formerly a common practice. The postrelease mortality associated with baited treble hooks is currently unknown, and we encourage future research to investigate whether this mortality differs from that associated with the currently allowed circle hooks. Although this study was focused solely on baited hooks, the relationship between release condition and mortality described here should be generally relevant to any observations of Striped Bass release condition (following our scoring system), regardless of the specific tackle configuration used. Therefore, the results of this study could be combined with observations of release condition from artificial lures or other hook types to determine the mortality rate associated with these tackle choices. This, in turn, could be combined with representative information on tackle choices (lure type or baited hooks) of Striped Bass anglers to estimate a coastwide discard mortality rate for the entire recreational fishery.”