Fisheries managers in Alabama have worked diligently to produce outstanding opportunities for the state's anglers to tangle with big bass. Their efforts have centered on producing increased quantity and size in the bass available to fishermen.

Photo by Ron Sinfelt

For many years, the Fisheries Section of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries stocked the Florida strain of black bass in reservoirs across the state, attempting to change the genetic makeup of the northern bass already in the reservoirs. It was hoped that crossing the two would create a F-1 hybrid of the two strains.

Such an F-1 hybrid was expected to exhibit the Florida bass' tendencies to live longer, grow faster and put on weight more quickly than the northern strain. They were also attempting to breed into the F-1 the characteristic aggression of the northern strain, which more readily attacks artificial baits.

Nick Nichols, the assistant chief of the Fisheries Section, said this program has not had much success.

"When we did some genetic evaluation of the program, we couldn't see any effect at all of stocking Florida bass in state waters," he lamented. "We realized that part of the poor performance of the Florida bass stockings may have been because our stocking rate was only about one Florida bass fingerling per surface acre of water in each reservoir we stocked."

A CHANGE OF MANAGEMENT FOR BASS
Several years ago, the Fisheries Section came up with a new plan to increase the amount Florida-strain genetics in some state reservoirs.

"The state started putting almost all of our hatcheries' production in one or two parts of two reservoirs, to see if we could increase the genetics of the Florida strain largemouth bass, at least in a portion of some public waters," Nichols explained.

The state tested this theory on Lay Lake, on the Coosa River chain near Birmingham, and Lake Demopolis at the confluence of the Warrior and the Tombigbee rivers in southwest Bama.

Before this stocking program began, fishery scientists took tissue samples from several bass in each of these reservoirs to develop a baseline study of the genetics in the two test areas.

"Once we got our baseline of the genetic makeup of the bass in these two reservoirs, we divided the number of Florida bass fingerlings produced in our hatcheries and stocked them into Lake Demopolis and Lay Lake," Nichols explained. "We had chosen good, isolated locations in these two reservoirs where we could study the effects of stocking intensively."

The biologists used Beeswax Creek, the largest significant embayment on Lay Lake, as the study area there and chose two smaller embayments on Lake Demopolis.

"Although we didn't see a significant shift in gene pattern in the bass in Demopolis, we eventually did see a change in the gene pattern in the bass in Lay Lake," Nichols reported.

Next, the managers turned to Wheeler Lake on the Tennessee River and stocked several embayments, including Flint Creek, with large numbers of the Florida bass. On this lake, as on Lay Lake, a small shift in the genetic makeup of the bass was noted in the study region. The ongoing study has now moved to Smith Lake near Jasper.