What Factors influence the Smallmouth population

[Smalliebigs]

5 minutes ago, tjm said:

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.

I feel the same way....It has always burned me up as to why the MDC stocked certain tributaries with Spotted Bass???

This was an obvious huge mistake on their part.

[MOPanfisher]

Is it a good biologic principle to transplant genetics from somewhere else to the Ozarks.  The very things that we think we want (primarily larger, faster growing fish) may come at a cost, namely diluting the native DNA, and any downsides that come with it.  I love our native undiluted smallmouth, and would prefer not to approach the native fish populations as if they were cattle we could cross breed as we see fit.  I don't know what the answer is, except maybe everything changes, sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse, depending upon your point of view.

[Jim Spriggs]

When did the MDC stock Spots?  Is that how they got in the Meramec?  I didn’t know that.  

 

So, it is a native versus transplanted fish.  That’s a big debate across the county.

What is interesting is that in other states, the smallies are the non-native fish.  They were deregulated in the Pacific Northwest because they were  said to be hurting the native salmon.  

https://www.seattletimes.com/sports/daily-catch-and-size-limits-removed-in-the-columbia-river-starting-thursday-for-bass-walleye-and-channel-catfish/

And, there was a big fight on the Sacramento Delta, too, and the black bass won the fight over dropping regulations , but that battle isn’t over. 

https://www.google.com/amp/s/sacbee.relaymedia.com/amp/news/local/environment/article97473712.html

 

[MoCarp]

2 hours ago, SpoonDog said:

...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. 

not accurate...if you take a dog you can breed them up or down in a few generations..fish can be selectively bred much faster than most species....genetics are the future....look at the success Missouri is having with triploid brown trout..in a put and take environment it can be ideal

 

2 hours ago, SpoonDog said:

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. 

ALL humanity is getting bigger..it isn't food is less growth reading childhood sickness...I am 57 had mumps..measles and chicken pox....all kids did....my age groups grand kids will not have to go trough those sicknesses....that and better prenatal care have bumped sizes in human populations

2 hours ago, SpoonDog said:

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. 

I would love to see where the "mother strain" of SMB came from...if you look as some of the more obscure black basses you can see the that they are closer related to SMB than LMB....there is methodology that could identify where that is.. but with early fisheries agency a bass was just a bass...so that confuses the situation

2 hours ago, SpoonDog said:

 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. 

Thats just crazy talk....the window of growth in lake of the woods is tiny compared to an ozark stream..or area lake...as far as growth profiles I have read...June July and August are the fastest growth months...food is is hyper available during those months, insects come on heavy in the hottest months..(see them bats?)when moths at night start to come on are one of the best times to top water fish for bronze backs...jitterbugs and now ploppers..can get you the biggest fish of the season 

2 hours ago, SpoonDog said:

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. 

those same farmers/ land owners do what they want to do...unfettered fish stabbing...etc...like I have said in other posts you may pay for the use of the land but that land will be there once you are dead and gone you only "own" it while you are here on this earth...and the effects that you do to the land can run generations down time from you...something I feel is lost on many

in closing GMO is a term you might hear a time of 2 over then next few years

[fishinwrench]

I don't see any Kentucky in that toad.   Looks all Smallie to me.

Nice one !

[Gavin]

Yep it's a hybrid. Barring below the lateral line. Biggest one Iv'e ever seen. Nice catch Scott.

[snagged in outlet 3]

I’ve looked at that pic a dozen times.   Looked at hundreds of pics of smallies and they look just like that. 

What specific markings make it s hybrid?!?

[Mitch f]

3 minutes ago, snagged in outlet 3 said:

I’ve looked at that pic a dozen times.   Looked at hundreds of pics of smallies and they look just like that. 

What specific markings make it s hybrid?!?

The scales higher up in the back, near the dorsal have a thick line around the periphery of the scales. The shape of the fish also. Also the dark barring near the tail

[snagged in outlet 3]

Okay. I see that. Thx. 

[Al Agnew]

You can also see the rows of spots below the midline, and a hint of a darker midline on that fish.  the tail shape is more spotted bass as well.  It's definitely a hybrid, and the biggest one I know to have been caught in a Missouri stream.  My brother had the biggest I'd ever seen until this one, a 19 incher from Big River.

A few facts and a few suppositions again about spotted bass in the Meramec River system...they began showing up in the lower Meramec in the 1980s.  Having extensively fished the Meramec and Big River prior to that time, I'd never seen one in the Meramec and had caught only two, both in the same pool in the same year (1970s) on middle Big River.  When they first appeared in any kind of numbers on the lower Meramec, they rapidly spread up the Meramec, Big, and Bourbeuse.  The mill dams on Big and Bourbeuse slowed them down for a while, but by the 2000s they were in pretty much all of Big and Bourbeuse.  They've rapidly become nearly as numerous as smallmouth on nearly all of Big River, up to the Leadwood Access on the upper river.  They are now found throughout the Bourbeuse as well.  They are uncommon compared to smallmouth above Meramec State Park on the Meramec, and don't seem to be increasing farther upstream.

In the 1960s, MDC stocked spotted bass in several streams flowing into the Missouri River from the north.  Closest stream to the Meramec where spotted bass were stocked was the Loutre River, which enters the Missouri pretty close to the mouth of the Gasconade, but on the opposite side of the river.  The idea was to see if spotted bass would do well in streams that had only marginal largemouth and/or smallmouth populations.  Obviously, they had no idea that spotted bass would be a huge problem for smallmouth in the northern Ozark streams.  So, spotted bass in the Meramec could have come from the Loutre River fish, but they would have had to travel a significant distance down the Missouri River, then down the Mississippi River to the mouth of the Meramec.

Spotted bass were not native to any of the northern Ozark streams, including the Osage and tributaries, but sometime prior to 1940 they were apparently introduced into Lake of the Ozarks--no one knows who or when.  They spread down the lower Osage and up the tributaries from those Lake Ozark fish, and probably that's how they got into streams like Maries River, and almost certainly how they got into the Moreau River, which enters the Missouri very close to the mouth of the Osage.  So it's barely possible THOSE fish eventually went down a long distance of the Missouri River, etc. to get to the Meramec, but not as likely as the Loutre River stocked fish.

The third possibility, and the one I believe to be by far the most likely, is that they spread up the Mississippi River from native populations in southeast Missouri.  In my own experience catching these fish, I think there's pretty convincing proof of this.  I have fished the smaller tributaries of the Mississippi between Cape Girardeau and St. Louis for many years, since the early 1970s at least.  The farthest downstream significant tributary is Apple Creek, which is on the boundary of Cape Girardeau County and Perry County.  There's a mill dam in the middle of Apple Creek.  In the early 1970s I was going to college in Cape, living down there, and fished Apple Creek quite a bit.  Below the mill dam, spotted bass were thick.  Above it, with very little difference in habitat, there were no spotted bass at all then.  So it seemed that at some point spotted bass had colonized the lower portion of Apple Creek but the mill dam stopped them.  

At the same time period, early to mid-1970s, I also fished the lower portion of Saline Creek, the next significant tributary upstream, and there were no spotted bass.  But by the late 1970s the spots were thick in lower Saline Creek.  By 1980 they were also thick in the next upstream tributary, Establishment Creek.  So obviously they were spreading upstream on the Mississippi to colonize those creeks.  I didn't fish Joachim and Plattin Creek, the final significant tributaries they would have reached before getting up to the Meramec, during that time period, so I don't know when they reached those creeks, but they are thick in the lower halves of those creeks now and have been since the first time I fished them in the 1990s.  

So the time line fits for them to have reached the Meramec in the early 1980s from those fish coming up the Mississippi.

(By the way, according to the revised "Fishes of Missouri", spotted bass first appeared in the Moreau River in the late 1950s, before the stockings in the Loutre and other streams, so those fish definitely came from the Osage River, and appeared in the next upstream Missouri River tributary, Moniteau Creek, by 1962.  Pflieger, the author of the book, examined two specimens in the lower Gasconade in 1974, but says a fisherman there told him he had caught them in the Gasconade as early as 1961.  So the timeline for the Gasconade fish could fit either the Loutre River stocking, or if that fisherman was correct, fish coming down the Missouri from the Osage.  He also says a spot was netted at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi in 1969, and in the early 1970s several were found at the mouth of Isle du Bois Creek, a small tributary of the Mississippi between Establishment Creek and Joachim Creek.  But none were reported in the Meramec until the early 1980s.  And then there were those two strays I caught in Big River in the 1970s.  So there were apparently a few fish that got to these streams a little earlier than the mass colonizations.)

Here, once again, (I've written this more than once on here during spotted bass discussions) is my theory on WHY the spots could have migrated up the Mississippi during this time period, and not before:  First, in order for fish to be able to colonize new water more or less "naturally", they have to have good connections open up for them to get there.  There were several reasons why there weren't any good connections in early years or centuries.  The spots that were native to the Castor River would have been the closest population to the Meramec.  But prior to the 1900s, Castor flowed into the flat swamplands of the Bootheel of Missouri, and on down into Arkansas for a long way before reaching the Mississippi well below the mouth of the Ohio River.  Spots are native to the Ohio River system, but weren't native to the Mississippi river system above the Ohio.  Probably they found the Ohio easy to travel up, because it was historically a relatively clear river compared to the muddy Mississippi, which was exceptionally muddy above the Ohio because the Missouri River was EXTREMELY muddy almost all the time and added a lot of mud to the Mississippi, which the Ohio diluted slightly.  So the Mississippi between the Ohio and the Meramec was probably too muddy to be a highway for spotted bass.

But then the Diversion Channel was constructed, in the early 1900s.  It cut off Castor River where it leaves the Ozarks, and shunted it directly into the Mississippi just south of Cape Girardeau.  Suddenly the connecting route for spots to get to the Meramec was considerably shortened.  But there was still that problem of the Mississippi being too muddy.  By that time, and for many years after, the Mississippi may have also been too polluted from St. Louis and points north to be hospitable to spotted bass.

Then, in the 1950s, several large dams were built on the upper Missouri River in Montana and the Dakotas.  They allowed the silt that continually eroded into the upper Missouri to settle out.  While the Missouri was still muddy, it was not carrying the silt load it had before the dams, and probably it became usable to spotted bass, and since it wasn't dumping as much mud into the Mississippi, the Mississippi wasn't as muddy downstream, either.

And then the Clean Water Act came along, and by the early 1970s the pollution situation on the Mississippi was a lot better, too.  So a less muddy, less polluted Mississippi, added to the shortened distance the spots had to travel to get to tributaries with good habitat, finally allowed them to reach the Meramec.

Of course, in the end it doesn't matter.  They are there.  And they have had a horrific impact on smallmouth.  The fact is that Bourbeuse, Big, and the Meramec below Meramec State Park is excellent spotted bass habitat, which is why they have thrived there.  But before they were there, it was also excellent habitat for smallmouth...as long as they didn't have to compete with spotted bass.  In fact, these streams are far more fertile than the deep Ozark streams, and the smallmouth probably had better growth rates in them than they do in streams like Current River and the other exceedingly clear and infertile streams of the deep Ozarks.  But it was even better habitat for spots, and as the spots increased, the smallmouth decreased.  They use the same habitat niches in these streams, and they can only grow a finite "biomass" of bass.  Before spotted bass, that biomass was all smallmouth.  But now it's half or more spotted bass.  So that's the first big impact...there are simply a LOT fewer smallmouth, and that means a lot fewer BIG Smallies.  If a given stream stretch once could accommodate 1000 adult smallmouth, and 2% were over 20 inches, it now holds 500 or fewer adult smallies, and even if 2% of them are still over 20 inches, that's only half the number of 20 inchers it had before.  And because the spots are so prolific but don't grow as big as smallmouth, there are probably even greater impacts as more spots eat more of the available food.  Plus, the lower half of Big River, lower half of Bourbeuse, and the Meramec below the mouth of the Bourbeuse, are more like 90 plus percent spotted bass, and these stretches once grew a lot of big smallmouth.

So...I wish there was a way to drastically reduce spotted bass in these stream sections.  If it could be done, it would automatically bring the numbers of big smallmouth up greatly.  But I've about come to the conclusion that there just isn't any way to do that.  Still, a year round open season with no limits on spotted bass in these streams would be a possible way to change the balance of the two species.  Couple it with catch and release on smallmouth and it might make a huge difference.  Basically, it would be increasing the numbers of adult smallies, which would result in greater numbers of BIG smallies.