Social security striped bass?

The Methuselah stripers and gators show up in NC’s Roanoke River

I remember, years ago, talking to Scott Van Horn, a crackerjack fisheries biologist with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission, about a crappie study being done on B. Everett Jordan Lake.

Van Horn told me he’d collected a nice crappie, a pound or so, but nothing out of the ordinary, and removed the otoliths, the ear bones that are used to learn the fish’s age.

The fish, Van Horn said, was 16 years old.

I remember joking, “Ah, gee, Scott, he just got his driver’s license, and you killed him.”

I never guessed that I’d hear a story about a fish any older than that one, with the exception maybe of some old flathead or blue catfish. Or maybe an ancient bull redfish older than the surf fisherman who caught it.

Then, the N.C. Division of Marine Fisheries announced that angler Clark Purvis of Hobgood, N.C., had caught a tagged striped bass from the Roanoke River this past April 29 that turned out to be 31 years old.

In fish years, that’s Methuselah

Purvis found a pink tag sticking out of the side of the 40-inch fish, cut it off, released the fish back into the river and sent the tag to the Division. Staff members did a little research and found that the fish had been tagged in 1995 in a joint effort between the Division and Commission, in the Roanoke River, just downstream of Weldon, N.C.

Records showed that the fish was a 21-inch male when it was tagged and was likely from the 1989 year-class. It is the oldest fish on record with the Division — which doesn’t even use pink tags anymore — and ties for the oldest striped bass on record; a Maryland fish caught in 1992 was also judged to be 31.

“Previously, the oldest striped bass we had seen come off the Albemarle-Roanoke spawning grounds was 23 years old,” said Charlton Godwin, a Division biologist.

Before the fish Purvis caught, the longest any fish had remained at large after the Division had tagged it was about 20 years. The Division has been actively tagging fish for about 40 years.