Michael,
Here is my cyberdork, fisheries PhD reply...
Lets hope the answer to your question is a combination of
A: forward looking fisheries management will forestall this, and
B: there will be so damn many fish that it doesn't matter how many get killed.
Thats what the managers of the fishery are hoping for. They assume that enough of todays schoolies will make it to spawning size so there will be no problem even if everyone takes one home.
The gamble is, with a fish like the striped bass you never know when the next really strong year class will come along- environmental conditions during the first year of life are more important than the number of spawning adults (althouth you need some minimum to seed all the spawning grounds and keep up the genetic diversity of the population). That's why bass have evolved a life history that allows them to live a long time- spawn many times and let the few strong year classes carry the population through the bad years in between.
Current management WILL work as long as the time between good years is not TOO long. If it's 10 years down the road before the conditions are right for the production of another really good year class, AND we keep the liberal regulations, there may NOT be enough fish left in the spawning population. BUT, our tax dollars are hard at work paying fish squeezers like me (although I do not work on striped bass), to keep an eye on things and make shure that the doomsday senario you describe does not happen. Even so, the track record of modern fisheries management is not good- just look at the groundfish stocks here in New England, or the salmon populations in the Northwest (don't get me started down that road...) But, let's look at the bright side- I never caught a striper when I was growing up in this area (1970s and early 80's) I went to the west coast for grad. school, and now you can't keep the things off of your hook. Given this success, I think the political willpower wi
ll be there if we need to take a step back to more conservative regulations down the road to protect the spawning stocks.
A slot-limit might work (release small and large fish and keep the medium size ones), but you can run into problems there too:
Out on the Columbia River the fishing pressure is so high, and the fish production so low, that virtually no sturgeon survive to grow larger that the legal limit. They are removed by the fishery as soon as they are legal- so the spawning stock is declining and not being replaced.
And with a fish like the striped bass, once a strong year class grows out of the slot, it could be a few years before another comes along- you would end up releasing a lot of big fish (wish I had that problem!).
CHS