Life History

Bluefish are the only members of the family, Pomatomidae, and are closely related to jacks, pompanos, and roosterfish. Bluefish are greenish blue with a sturdy compressed body, a large head, and sharp, triangular teeth. They are found throughout the world and are a migratory species that range from Nova Scotia to Florida off the Atlantic coast and can be found in the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Texas. Along the east coast, bluefish migrate northward in the spring and summer and southward in the fall and winter. During the summer, bluefish are concentrated from Maine to Cape Hatteras, North Carolina and during the winter, most tend to be offshore and south between Cape Hatteras and Florida.

Bluefish are a pelagic schooling species that primarily travel in groups of like-sized fish. Most bluefish mature by age 2 (approximately 14½ inches), and females can produce from 900,000 to 4,500,000 eggs. Spawning and larval development takes place offshore in the South Atlantic (North Carolina to Florida) in the spring and to a lesser extent in the summer and fall, and in the mid-Atlantic during the summer. In Chesapeake Bay, peak spawning occurs offshore in July. After they spawn, bluefish move inshore with smaller fish generally entering Chesapeake and Delaware Bay and larger ones moving northward. Juvenile bluefish grow quickly and by late fall, there are usually two size groups along the mid-Atlantic and New England coasts. Those fish that were spawned in the south during the spring are 6-8 inches, whereas those spawned in the summer are 2-4 inches. Most juvenile bluefish spawned in the south during the summer in the mid-Atlantic and in the fall in the South Atlantic remain in the coastal waters, but some summer-spawned fish do enter the lower Bay for a couple of months before they return to the coast in the fall and join the adults in their move southward.

Bluefish are voracious predators and sight feeders; they will strike at almost any object in the water column. Consequently, they feed on a variety of fish and invertebrates, including butterfish, menhaden, herring, sand lances, silversides, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, weakfish, spotted seatrout, croaker, spot and squid.