Verification of a Stripeless Striped Bass, Morone saxatilis, in Miramichi River, New Brunswick, Canada

A Morone saxatilis (Striped Bass) without horizontal black stripes, typically used to identify this species, was caught by an angler in the Miramichi River, near Chatham, NB, on 11 October 2020. The 6-year-old specimen measured 59 cm total length (56 cm fork length) and weighed 2.22 kg. Striped Bass are typically characterized by 7 to 8 dark horizontal lines expressed laterally. Stripes vary in pattern, including straight and parallel lines, broken or disjointed lines, or in the extreme, a checkerboard pattern. The specimen was identified as a Striped Bass morphologically using the arrangement of tongue dentition and the lack of antrorse spines on the pre-operculum, and molecularly using the barcoding region. This specimen appears to be the first Striped Bass recorded without stripes.