Verification of a Stripeless Striped Bass, Morone saxatilis, in Miramichi River, New Brunswick, Canada

Abstract

A Morone saxatilis (Striped Bass) without horizontal black stripes, typically used to identify this species, was caught by an angler in the Miramichi River, near Chatham, NB, on 11 October 2020. The 6-year-old specimen measured 59 cm total length (56 cm fork length) and weighed 2.22 kg. Striped Bass are typically characterized by 7 to 8 dark horizontal lines expressed laterally. Stripes vary in pattern, including straight and parallel lines, broken or disjointed lines, or in the extreme, a checkerboard pattern. The specimen was identified as a Striped Bass morphologically using the arrangement of tongue dentition and the lack of antrorse spines on the pre-operculum, and molecularly using the barcoding region. This specimen appears to be the first Striped Bass recorded without stripes.Introduction. Pronounced horizontal black stripes make Morone saxatilis (Walbaum) (Striped Bass) one of the most easily recognizable fishes in North America. This recreational angling favorite occupies fresh water, brackish, and marine environments and occurs within a native range along the Gulf Coast from Florida to Louisiana and along the Atlantic Coast from the the Saint Lawrence River, QC, Canada, to St. Johns River, FL (Striped Bass Technical Task Force 2006), and since 2017, with a probable northward range expansion to Labrador (Andrews et al. 2019;Van Leeuwen et al. 2021). Its broad distribution and many individuals caught by recreational angling and commercial fisheries have provided much data to describe morphological variation, including the striped pattern (