A Striped Bass Curiosity: Roe Sacs In NY Waters

A dozen years or so ago, I caught six or seven striped bass in the late spring and early summer that, when I filleted them, I discovered had large roe sacs still in their bellies.

I’ve never seen it in a fish I caught again and had never heard anyone else mention it — until this year. I’ve heard from several fishermen this year who caught fish with big sacs of roe in them. One Montauk charter captain told me it’s a regular occurrence in June.

When I cut open the first one, I was shocked by this, and a little saddened, because I thought I had killed a female that had yet to spawn and now never would.

But then I thought about it. It was early June, and the fish was caught off a beach on eastern Long Island. Where would that fish have been going to spawn, exactly? Since by then it was already the end of the spawning runs in the Hudson and a hundred miles east of that, it would have to be somewhere else.

I know there are spawning runs of stripers in a couple of Massachusetts rivers and in Nova Scotia — could this have been one of those? Are there stripers spawning in the Connecticut River that I’d never heard about?

There’s long been local speculation of them spawning in the Peconic River, but the logistics of that, with the dams and other blockages, make it incredibly unlikely.

There’s been talk — mostly harebrained spit-balling from the window of a pickup truck — about them spawning in other little local corners, like Scallop Pond, Three Mile Harbor and Lake Montauk. I doubt there’s been any detailed studies of anomalies in fish spawning adaptation, but from what is generally understood about the biology of anadromous fish like striped bass and salmon, that is pretty much impossible.

Way back when, I asked Craig Cantelmo, who most of us know as the Van Staal fishing reels guy but who is actually a marine biologist by training, what he thought of the matter. He suggested that these were mostly likely females from the Hudson River spawning run that had failed to spawn for one reason or another, and that the egg sacs were just starting to decay within their bodies and ultimately would be reabsorbed.

If this is correct, then perhaps there’s an explanation — possibly a very foreboding one — as to why it seems to be more prevalent one year and then not others.

Maybe those are years when the Hudson River run doesn’t have good conditions for successful spawning? WARNING: This is wild speculation. And, as I just noted, one charter captain who catches as many striped bass as anyone says he sees it with pretty consistent frequency every year, so the anomalousness may just be relative to my circle of contacts.

When it came up this spring, I reached out to Eric Durell of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, who said that it’s possible that the fish are immature females who have started developing egg sacs but have not reached sexual maturity yet. But he said those eggs likely would be orange, whereas the eggs we usually see are pale yellow or green, which is the color of mature, healthy eggs ready for spawning.

This seems odd, since we usually think of ripe fish eggs that we would want to eat as some shade of orange, like shad and salmon roe, but I found talk on food websites about cooking those green striper egg sacs and how delicious they are.

So I’ve still yet to find a definitive answer for what the story is behind these egg-sac fish. The failed spawn possibility is very plausible, since we all know that nature has its foibles.

It seems most likely to me that they are fish headed for a Massachusetts spawning run. If so, I would offer this: If you catch a striper in June and can discern that it clearly has a full egg sac in it still — when you’re on the lookout for it, you can tell the difference between that and a belly full of bunker — please release it.

If there’s any chance that fish will make it to her spawning grounds and release those eggs, then it’s worth the sacrifice. You could be releasing thousands of stripers with that one act of consideration.

Catch ’em up. See you out there.