Timmy Facciola reports in the Times Union that an annual Department of Environmental Conservation study found that striped bass spawned at historically low rates last year, their worst spawn in the Hudson River since 1985. In a comment to the newspaper, a DEC official said that the stock of striped bass has been “lower than desired since 2012,” and that “while 2023 was a below-average year for juvenile striped bass in the Hudson River, the values observed in recent years are within the range of normal.” But while the DEC says publicly that it is not concerned, at the Jan. 24 meeting of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, which sets fishing regulations along the East Coast, most of written comments from anglers called for extending emergency regulations put in place last year to slow population decline. The Hudson River is one of the two main breeding grounds on the East Coast for striped bass, and each spring, schools of hog-sized stripers come from the waters off the coast of the Carolinas. Conditions in the other major breeding waters, the Chesapeake Bay, are worse. Tony Friedrich, policy director of the American Saltwater Guides Association, said, “There’s no way that the Hudson (or any) other estuary system in the striped bass range can produce the number of fish that the Chesapeake can. And that’s the problem." Read more about this story in the Times Union.