Striped bass can’t get a break, it seems. With their East Coast population in decline from overfishing, the migratory species had mixed success reproducing in the Chesapeake Bay this year, surveys show.

The Maryland Department of Natural Resources reported that its annual trawl survey of newly spawned striped bass in state waters yielded just 2.5 little fish per net haul—far below the long-term average of 11.5 per sample.

“We just didn’t have good recruitment [of young fish] this year,” said Mike Luisi, the DNR’s director of fisheries monitoring and assessment. This is the second straight year and the 10th in the last 15 years that the Maryland DNR survey found evidence of below-average striped bass reproduction.

In Virginia

A separate study done by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science found an above-average number of juvenile striped bass in the state’s tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay. It was the eighth straight year in which the survey tallied an average or above-a...