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Cold snap killing off speckled trout stocks

Cold weather is killing speckled trout, and an unlikely coalition of commercial and recreational fishermen is taking the equally unlikely stance that the Virginia Marine Resources Commission needs to close the fishery temporarily.

 

Gloucester residents Keith Nuttall, an avid recreational fisherman and former VMRC patrol officer; Bill Mullis, a commercial fishing fleet owner; and Jon Lucy, a speckled trout fisherman and retired marine scientist, are concerned that unusually cold weather will have a long-term negative impact on the speckled trout fishery in the Chesapeake Bay.

 

Lucy said there had been a significant number of documented kills in North Carolina this winter, especially since the second snow, but it’s been hard to come up with numbers to determine how many have died in the Chesapeake Bay. It’s clear, however, that the number of speckled trout that have died in the winter has increased “by an order of magnitude” over the past two...

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