Making a case for conservation.

I think it's important when scientists with the credentials of Science 's Editor-in-Chief Donald Kennedy make an effort to portray scientific evidence in terms the public can understand, as he did in his recent Editorial “POTUS and the fish” (26 July, p. [477][1]) about President Bush and daughter Jenna's striped bass capture during a Maine vacation this summer. I have absolutely no quarrel with Kennedy's comments regarding the extension of species' ranges as a result of climatic change, but I'm not sure the striped bass incident he cites is a case in point. Morone saxatilis is a broadly distributed species. Old ichthyology texts list its range from Louisiana in the Gulf of Mexico up to the New Brunswick coast of Canada—well within the area of the Bush expedition. In the 1950s, I worked as a mate on a charter boat that fished in huge schools of stripers in Cape Cod (now Massachusetts) Bay, north of the Cape. By the time I began doing research at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole in the late 1960s, not only were stripers in decline north of Cape Cod, as Kennedy indicates, but by the late 1980s, only the old salts were able to catch stripers south of the Cape, and then not reliably. The North Atlantic population of M. saxatilis , most of which originates in the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays, had entered a period of steep decline. There were few striped bass anywhere along the Atlantic coast, outside of hatcheries. While I'm not sure if the problem causing the decline was actually ever identified—there were the usual handwringings and accusations of pollution versus overfishing (both likely to blame)—in 1981, a massive striped bass conservation effort was undertaken by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission (ASMFC), which developed and adopted a striped bass management plan involving states from Maine to North Carolina. This effort seems notable to me, not only for its success, but also for the incredible cooperation that was ultimately achieved among several state and local governments, commercial and local fishermen, restaurateurs, and biologists. Instead of global warming, I think it's more likely that the Bushs' catch, especially because the first family was fishing well within the native range of the species, was due to this major conservation effort coupled with a very successful M. saxatilis spawn in the Chesapeake Bay several years ago. Indeed, the conservation effort was so successful that the ASMFC declared the Chesapeake Bay stock of Atlantic striped bass, which supports the greatest portion of the Atlantic coastal stock, recovered as of 1 January 1995 ([1][2]). Still, I hope the lesson will not be lost on the president. Conservation and management of natural resources, along with a helping hand from nature, can work in at least some cases. 1. [↵][3]See . # Response {#article-title-2} I should have given more credit to striped bass conservation, which Pierce properly praises for having boosted populations all along the Atlantic Coast. Henry Bigelow's classic Fishes of the Gulf of Maine documents that populations along the Maine coast were relatively low compared with those south of Cape Cod before World War II, but included numbers of Chesapeake and Delaware migrants in “good years.” Recent conservation-based improvement in bass reproductive success doubtless contributed to making the Bush fishing trip a success. But the impact of climate change on the distribution of other marine species strongly supports the idea that northward range extension was at work for stripers as well. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.297.5581.477 [2]: #ref-1 [3]: #xref-ref-1-1 "View reference 1 in text"