With every year the fishing season starts back up the population is slowly going down because the striped bass do not have enough time to repopulate. The government does not think striped bass are being overfished because how NOAA determines the daily quota is by interviewing fishermen and see how many fish they caught. Sometimes the quota is off because it is just an estimate because NOAA does not interview everyone. The government thinks that striped bass are not being fished in a all around population count with the amount of fish and amount of habitat. Striped bass are now grouping up in small areas instead of all around. The fish seem to be gone in most places but are really all in one spot. The striped bass commercial harvest steadily grew from 3.4 million pounds in 1995 to peak at over 7 million pounds in 2003. Commercial harvest of the species since 2004 has averaged around 7 million pounds per year. (http://www.asmfc.org/species/atlantic-striped-bass) Overfishing of the striped bass population is not known, NOAA and the fisheries think so but the fishermen do not from first hand experience. How overfishing affects fishermen is in the future if overfishing continues current fishermen are now catching fish getting less and less every year. Future fishermen will not have jobs because all of the fish will be gone.
The striped bass quota is a state limit of how many fish all of the fishermen can take. All of the state quotas get added together at the end of the season to meet a national quota. Each state has different quota amounts depending on how big the population of fishermen is. If the quota is not maintained and enforced then the population for sure will go down drastically. The quota is a big variable for the fishermen because it determines how much money fishermen can make in that amount of time. Now fishermen can only take two fish per person or a 15 fish per boat limit with the fish being at least 34 inches, with some exceptions with different licenses and businesses.