What Factors influence the Smallmouth population

[MoCarp]

as far as growth rates....north country states have very short growing seasons and produce far more big smallmouth than we do...the TVA system grows monster fish....better genetics

the recent push to stock TN strain smallmouths have pushed states to look closer to looking at the genetics of our fish...the last convo I had with a state biologist they were getting fin clips of our areas fish to get a baseline on what we have

the Neosho strain is a different critter...but we know almost nothing about why they are different from growth rates, top end potential etc

In most waters that feed a lake smallmouths will populate the lake..that never happened in grand lake..catching a brown bass lake side of #10 bridge isn't common...and we don't know why

how can we have better fishing?....get the brood stock of the native fish that express the traits we as anglers want stock the hell out of that strain....make sure they have food...and that means address the prey items, pollution and gravel intrusion may mean less crawfish and small chubs...don't think thats ever been studied much.....with more aggressive management we can have bigger smallmouth....I talked to old timers that told be they used to catch 6-7 pound smallmouths from the elk river drainage before the dam went in at disney...(eels and blue cats too) they also say how much shallower the river is now these are people that fished the river pre WWII....I wish I could go back in time and document some of what the old timers used to say about fishing back then....I wonder about the logs and brush that are not in the rivers like in the past...I remember a study on how old and how long some of the streams logs have been in there....shocking but some are over 10k years old....ice age no less.....MU has done a lot on this....a guy found a log once and could not tell what species it was brought a chunk back and it turned out to be a species of conifer that only grows today in the far north on the edge of the tree line for arctic tundra...those habitats have not existed in Missouri in over 12k years! then they carbon dated it and confirmed...it is interesting to think about what things where like back then....

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5f8d/581024858518bd4f1e97deb621ef1ad133d0.pdf

[Jim Spriggs]

Let’s see a pic of that monster Spot.  

Has there ever been a study done of the influence of Spotted bass on Smallmouth in MO?  That would be a interesting. 

There was a big conflict in TN and AL over the affect of Stripers on Black bass. My recollection is that anglers believed the stripers hurt the black bass population, but the science said they didn’t. In the end, I think the management agency stopped stocking stripers to appease the anglers.  

And the Walleye fishermen at Mille Lacs Lake want the Smallmouth deregulated because they believe the Smallies are hurting the Walleye. 

Interesting stuff from a biological and political point of view.

[tjm]

42 minutes ago, MoCarp said:

.get the brood stock of the native fish that express the traits we as anglers want stock the hell out of that strain..

If the fish is native, why would it need stocking?

[tjm]

43 minutes ago, Jim Spriggs said:

Interesting stuff from a biological and political point of view.

Biology loses to politics every time.

[Smalliebigs]

1 hour ago, Jim Spriggs said:

Let’s see a pic of that monster Spot.  

Has there ever been a study done of the influence of Spotted bass on Smallmouth in MO?  That would be a interesting. 

There was a big conflict in TN and AL over the affect of Stripers on Black bass. My recollection is that anglers believed the stripers hurt the black bass population, but the science said they didn’t. In the end, I think the management agency stopped stocking stripers to appease the anglers.  

And the Walleye fishermen at Mille Lacs Lake want the Smallmouth deregulated because they believe the Smallies are hurting the Walleye. 

Interesting stuff from a biological and political point of view.

All very interesting points Jim....Al Agnew knows a ton about the Spotted bass influx on certain Ozark streams.

Here is the beast....she or he was right at 4.9 and 4.10 on Aaron's digital scale which we checked for accuracy as they can go out of calibration after awhile.

Aaron and I were a bit flabbergasted when he netted it

 

[Jim Spriggs]

Oh my.  She is a beast!  

[MoCarp]

2 hours ago, tjm said:

If the fish is native, why would it need stocking?

just like aunt ethers kids are fat and 6' tall...aunt junes kids are scrawny and are 5' 8" we want the genes of the BEST natives not just the ones that never reach 12" and get to spawn there whole lives driving the population smaller genetically

2 hours ago, tjm said:

Biology loses to politics every time.

squeaky wheels get the grease

[Jim Spriggs]

Science and politics are definitely in tension, but there are some states where political interference is worse than in others.  MO, for instance, has two institutional devices that, insulate the MDC from legislative attack.  It doesn’t eliminate outside interfence, and, of course, there are internal agency politics, too.  

The first is the way MDC is funded, which is unique in the US because over 65% of MDC funds comes from tax revenue rather than annual appropriations bills (I think Arkansas gets a small fraction from taxes, but other state conservation agencies have to battle it out each year for cash). I think we, as consumers, benefit from this revenue model.   The second is the way the commissioners are chosen—where the commission has to have partisan balance (four members, where no two can be from a given party).

Fishing and politics....

 

[SpoonDog]

...that isn't the way natural selection works.  You don't go from a 12" fish to a 20" fish, you go from a 12" fish to a 12.2" fish.  It's incremental, but many in the general public mistakenly look at genetics as some sort of silver bullet.  It isn't. 

South Koreans are eight inches taller (on average) than they were a century ago.  Guatemalans are five inches taller, on average.  Their genetics haven't changed drastically in three generations- what has changed is their access to food, shelter, and healthcare.  There's a link between genetics and growth- but it's dwarfed by the link between food and growth, or habitat and growth, or health and growth.  Even if it wasn't the case- there's no reason to think "genetics" that confer advantages in one habitat would confer advantages in all habitats.  I can drop a sumo wrestler in the Sahara- that doesn't mean when I come back five years later there'll be scores of little sumo wrestlers running around. 

15,000 years ago everything north of the Missouri River was covered in a mile of ice- every smallmouth in Minnesota or Michigan or Wisconsin was a popsicle.  They were all dead- every single one of them.  The only places smallmouth could've survive were places like Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee.  When the ice retreated the smallmouth colonizing those states carried a subset of genetic material from here. It's entirely likely Ozark smallmouth are more genetically diverse than those in states further north- not less.  If it's a question of genetics, they're probably already present in Ozark smallmouth. 

But it probably isn't genetics.  The relationship between fish growth and temperature isn't linear.  Most species have an optimal window above which growth either slows or stops- all their energy is going into homeostasis instead of growth.  The number of days in the growing season is irrelevant- what matters is the number of days in that window where smallmouth bass grow.  Smallmouth don't grow much above 80 degrees- which means in the Ozarks, you can throw out a good chunk of the summer.  Farther north, water temperatures may only rarely get above 80.  The growing season's shorter- but the number of days they can grow is longer. 

Genetics isn't magic, and its impact on something like growth is minor compared to other factors.  But dumping a truckload of Minnesota smallmouth into the Meramec is easier than convincing farmers not to run cows or backhoes or ATVs in their stream.  But it's only a shortcut if it leads somewhere- otherwise, it's just a dead end. 

[tjm]

There was a study about bass and Bergman's Rule, but I don't know the conclusions it reached, if any. (Increased size with increased latitude.)

For sure though a stocked fish is not a native fish. It is a stocked fish and if it has growth attributes that surpass the native fish, it very likely will become invasive and extirpate the native species, either by devouring them or by hybridization.  imho, we should learn from past mistakes of this nature. Concentrate any efforts on the fish we have and accept the limitations they might have. If I want to fish for exotics, I can always go to where the exotics are native.