The study was based on just 521 fish. I would think that is not a sufficient sampling size, but I’m not a scientist. And I do not see lots of letters following the names of the authors of this study.

One of the many things that makes me wonder is, who caught these 521 fish? What is their skill level? How many googans, COVID captains, are out there especially here in the NY Bight, that have absolutely no idea what they are doing, nor do they really care? Do any of these studies take that into consideration?

Another thing that makes me wonder……. at the end of the study they have 2 pages of references that were used. That to me says that this is not an entirely new study, but another study built on other studies? There’s an old saying………. Garbage in- garbage out.

I think what we need is an entirely new study starting from the bottom up.
You raise some fair points, but I think there’s some confusion here that needs clearing up.

First, the 521 fish study (Dinkelacker et al.) was never designed to replace the 9% mortality rate. That study measured how quickly fish recover their reflexes after being caught. It tracked fish for 20 minutes post release to see how air exposure, fight time, and handling affected their ability to swim away. It found 100% immediate survival, but fish held out of water longer took much longer to recover normal function. The point was to identify best handling practices, not to calculate a mortality percentage.

The study that actually challenges the 9% number is the Massachusetts DMF telemetry study, which tracked over 8,300 fish using acoustic tags implanted in striped bass caught by recreational anglers. These tags ping receivers stationed along the entire Atlantic coast. If a fish keeps pinging as it migrates, it survived. If it stops and never shows up again, it died. That study shows mortality closer to 4 to 5%, and under 2% for single hook artificials. Two completely different studies, two different purposes.

I’ve been involved in fisheries management for over three decades, and I have never seen a study this exhaustive on any recreational species. Over 8,300 fish, surgically implanted acoustic tags, receivers tracking migration patterns from Massachusetts to North Carolina, years of data collection. This is the gold standard. You’re not going to get a study much better than this. The technology simply didn’t exist in 1996, and now it does.

As for the old Diodati study being better because it had more letters after the authors’ names, let’s talk about what that study actually did. They trapped fish commercially, trucked them for 5 hours, dumped them in a 2 hectare pond, let volunteers catch 173 of them, and then drained the pond 8 weeks later. When they drained it, they found ZERO dead fish. The 9% came from fish that were simply missing and “presumed dead.” They assumed every missing fish died from catch and release. No bodies. No evidence. Just missing fish that could have escaped through the sluice gates, been eaten by birds, or lost their tags.

Here’s the kicker: the only confirmed deaths in the Diodati study were 2 fish out of 44 that died within 12 hours of being caught. That’s 4.5%. The rest of the “mortality” came from those 15 missing fish they never found. If those missing fish didn’t die from catch and release, the Diodati study lands at exactly 4.5%, the same number the modern telemetry study is showing with 8,300 fish. Think about that.

You ask about skill level of anglers. Fair question. But in the Diodati study, they used 50 volunteers from fishing clubs with varying experience levels, fishing in a pond with no current, no structure, and no real world conditions. The new telemetry study tracked fish caught by actual recreational anglers fishing in actual ocean conditions along the entire coast.

References in a scientific paper don’t mean “garbage in, garbage out.” They mean the authors reviewed existing literature, which is standard practice in any legitimate research. The Diodati study had references too.

Is the new research perfect? No. But it’s based on 8,300 fish tracked with modern technology in real world conditions versus 173 fish in a pond where they found zero dead bodies and assumed the missing ones all died. Which would you trust?