TPWD Response to Story Continues
Dan Bennett Response continues here –
This is the continuation of the previous TPWD email response that was posted without edit, or change in the Previous Story on TPWD’s Response. A complete listing of the stories in this 2024 Series is at the bottom of this post.
… “There really isn’t much of a connection between hybrid bass stockings and Florida bass stockings as you might allude to in your mention of disparities, except that there has been an few years where hybrid production was so low that more hatchery ponds were devoted to hybrid production the following year to try and “make-up” the losses so to speak. Hybrid lakes were initially selected based on productivity of lakes, open water area, and forage populations. Human population distribution is a consideration, but the actual habitat and productivity makes the most difference. But, since most reservoirs are constructed near population centers for water availability, and many of those reservoirs possess the qualities for good hybrid lakes, that may have influenced your perception of a stocking shift toward population centers. Some hybrid lakes have been removed from the stocking list over the years due to low angling effort measured in angler surveys. The hybrid program has also experienced many production difficulties over the last 25 years or so. Since I started by career in 2007 at least, we have had a moratorium on adding new lakes to the hybrid stocking program due to production limitations. Those started with golden alga kills in our hatcheries, and more recently the construction of the hydroelectric power plant at the Livingston dam, where we used to source our striped bass broodfish for production. Now we have had to shift to producing more sunshine bass using male stripers collected from Lake Texoma, and that has taken several years to perfect. However, the production has experienced a resurgence just in the last two to three years and we are again able to meet most of our biologists’ annual requests for the first time in years. That has likely resulted in what is perceived as in increase in stocking our hybrid lakes. I know I have just one hybrid lake in my district which is Lake Bridgeport, and due to the increased productivity of the lake (e.g. nutrient concentration) and availability of hybrid fingerlings, we are attempting to increase the stocking frequency to 10/acre annually as opposed to 5/acre every other year. We are planning an angler creel survey there in a few years to see if that increases fishing effort for hybrids. If it doesn’t, we will likely revisit that strategy. With the increase in Largemouth ShareLunker entries, we are also attempting to receive more stockings of Florida Bass at Bridgeport as well.”
Shannon –
I got some additional feedback from our statewide stocking program coordinator and Regional Director, Brian Vanzee, that I thought I would pass along to you.
“I think it’s also important to note that the reason for stockings also affects prioritization of stocking requests (i.e., Research, New/renovated reservoirs, Catastrophic event, and Management). Also, we round-robin all requests, first within a “zone” (i.e. East, Central, West) to ensure the top priorities for each District are elevated to the top of the list for each “zone” and then finally across the three zones to ensure that west and central TX reservoirs that are important to anglers in central and west TX also get equal consideration and to help ensure that fingerling production each year goes to the highest priority lakes across the state and not just to east TX. There are many things that go into the prioritization of species produced in our hatcheries and obviously Bass is king in TX, so we typically make more LMB than any other species if there isn’t any production issues or hatchery issues. Our FLMB/Lone Star Bass requests are usually in the 7-8 million range, and we typically produce 6-8 million fingerlings each year, again assuming there isn’t some issue with production or hatcheries. Morone requests are usually in the range of about 3 million hybrids and around 2 million Striped Bass and we try to produce, again when production goes well and we don’t have any issues, around 5-6 million fingerlings. The past few years Neil has really started to nail down the Morone production and as you pointed out we had to make the shift to Sunshine Bass as well as a captive broodstock program which took some time to figure out and to work out the kinks so in the past number of years we didn’t always or we couldn’t count on 5 million Morone fingerlings but that is getting better and more consistent. One thing that people forget is that all our Morone fisheries, outside of Texoma, are dependent upon stockings to maintain those fisheries as they don’t have enough or any natural recruitment. Unlike LMB that reproduce in basically every lake in the state. People also forget to look at the Northern LMB and Smallmouth Bass production that we do and stock each year as well as FLMB. Those species are limited on production ability and not nearly as many requests, but they do both also support bass fisheries across the state. We have a handful of good SMB fisheries in the state and the NLMB are used not only in our CFLs but also in some of our more northern lakes where they may do better than FLMB; we also maintain some pure NLMB populations to serve as broodfish sources for hatcheries.”
Time to start cleaning up some of the abbreviations and winding this part of the stocking story down. As we continue next week, I will provide some clarity on the abbreviations, and begin to talk about a more futuristic approach, maybe some would say, “wholistic approach” to lake fish stocking and the outdated “Magnet” lake approach.
READ PREVIOUS STORIES in this Series ON TPWD STOCKING –
- TEXAS TEA LEAVES – Hybrid Bass Stocking North Central Texas and DFW Specifically
- STOCKING PART 3
- STOCKING PART 2
- STOCKING PART 1
- TPWD FISH STOCKING INTRODUCTION by CHATGPT
Category: Bass on Fly, Science and Environmental, TECHNICAL
