[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON Feb-17-06 AT 10:22AM (EST)[/font][p][font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON Feb-17-06 AT 10:18*AM (EST)[/font]

Wrong and right...

Stripers have the same type air bladder system as bass, that being a sealed system that relies on gas exchange to equalize.

However, puncturing the belly or stomach will do nothing but kill the fish as you are not actually puncturing the swim bladder. The swim bladder actually lies in the middle to upper half of a fish, so any puncturing from below will just be doing damage to internal organs. To properly deflate you need a hypodermic needle and have to go in from the side beneath the scales near the lateral line. Do a search for the term "fizzing" online and you should be able to track down some good examples.

On the fighting to exhaustion part, there have been plenty of studies done on this. In most studies, mortality has been linked to hoooking location/bait used and water temperature, not length of fight duration. That said, they probably didn't test the extreme examples of playing a fish for 30-45 minutes at a time. As such, the extreme cases probably would result in mortality much of the time. Think in terms of how long would you survive if someone forced you to run until exhaustion, and then kept forcing you to run until you literally collapsed. You probably would die, too.

On the water temp relation, mortality is usually in the 5-15% range during the cold water periods (Nov.-Dec.) for stripers ,but quickly rises to near 70% once the water warms up in the summer. As such, the recommendation to stop fishing after catching your limit during the warm water periods is a good one because even if you release the fish, odds are it will die anyway.

-T9