I'm not a DFG biologist, but it's an interesting question that I've thought about. The literature about striped bass spawning success assumes that all fertilized striper eggs are denser than water and will sink to the bottom and die without sufficient current to prevent that. My question is, in deep reservoirs where stripers attempt to spawn (and they do...I've watched them, and also cleaned plenty that were females gravid with eggs or ripe & running males), are all eggs in all females equally buoyant? If not, are some neutrally buoyant with the about the same density as water? If there are some like that, and if the characteristic is a genetically inheritable trait, then some of those fertilized eggs could survive until hatching bouncing around in the water column, and those surviving striper fry could grow up to produce more neutrally buoyant eggs. Just a guess on my part...haven't done any research, but there has to be some explanation for why lakes like Castaic and DVL have so many striped bass when they don't have rivers flowing into them. I doubt that aquaduct spawning explains that, especially at Castaic where the incoming water comes in an underground tube from Lake Pyramid, where they're also not supposed to be spawning..