DATE: Tuesday, March 25, 1997               TAG: 9703250309

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B12  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS 

DATELINE: ANNAPOLIS                         LENGTH:   58 lines

STRIPED BASS POPULATION GROWS SWIMMINGLY IN BAY THE REBOUND INDICATES THE BAY NOW OFFERS A FRIENDLIER ENVIRONMENT FOR MARINE LIFE.

The Chesapeake Bay's striped bass population is resurging after a 12-year decline, an indication the Bay's health is also rebounding, scientists said Monday.

The average number of juvenile bass caught by researchers using 100-foot-wide survey nets rose to 6,500 in 1995 from 1,000 in 1985, a strong indicator the population is on the upswing, said Robert A. Bachman, deputy director of fisheries services for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources.

``They're just coming on like gangbusters,'' he said. ``We've never had so many basses in the bay.''

The numbers also mean a state ban on bass harvesting - from 1985 to 1990 - was successful, Bachman said.

Until this decade, the bay's health was on the downswing, caused by overdevelopment along the coast, industrial pollution, agricultural runoff and other factors.

Underwater grassbeds, which support wide varieties of small fish and other animals at the bottom of the food chain, perished in large numbers. Marine animals departed the bay en masse, and fishermen caught fewer and fewer fish.

Indeed, striped bass numbers got so low that scientists were debating whether to put the species on the federal endangered list.

Intense conservation efforts have been going on since the early 1980s, and now some bay-health indicators don't paint quite such a bleak picture. For instance, phosphate levels have gone down dramatically, although nitrogen levels have remained stable.

``We hope it means good things for the bay,'' said Fran Flanigan, executive director for the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay. ``There's a little leap of faith involved here. We don't really know what it is that triggers (the bass) population to go up and down.''

The bay's ill health killed off rockfish in record numbers, but overfishing also was largely to blame, Flanigan said.

``We learned the hard way that you cannot simply have a hands-off approach to fisheries management,'' Flanigan cautioned. ``Just because the fish come back doesn't mean we can return to a former hands-off kind of approach.

``The rockfish were trying to tell us something.''

The state began allowing limited striped bass fishing in 1991.

This year's quota is 5.5 million pounds for Maryland, 3.4 million pounds for Virginia and 1.6 million pounds for the Potomac River.

Bachman said the three-day rockfish summit is an effort to reach a consensus between watermen and recreational fishermen about how much bass each group should be allowed to harvest this year. That won't be decided until after a series of public hearings by the natural resources agency.

``The big question we have to consider is, are we being conservative enough?'' Bachman said. KEYWORDS: ROCKFISH STRIPED BASS CHESAPEAKE BAY

Send Suggestions or Comments to webmaster@scholar.lib.vt.edu