Better allocation of resources. I talked to was 75 years old. Black drum are a long lived fish, as high as 59 years, and are long distance migrators. Tagging does not appear to work well with black drum, out of 300 tagged there have only been 4 returns. The average age of the black drum caught in Virginia is 26 years old with a weight of approximately 30 pounds.
Black drum can and do spawn more than once a year.
1942 were good years. Black drum will spawn from a low of 60 to a high of 840,000,000 eggs per year. In general scientists feel that the black drum population is in reasonably good condition.