Goggle-Eye ID

[Ham]

On 7/17/2025 at 10:14 AM, Quillback said:

From AGFC:

Know Your Goggle-Eye In Arkansas, all goggle-eye species are managed together as "Rock Bass," with a daily limit of 10 and no minimum size limit. As a slow-growing species and with its schooling nature, the Ozark Bass can be vulnerable to overharvest, so by being selective with their harvest, anglers can play a key role in conserving this unique Ozark species for future generations. We hope you have time to get out on the river this summer and catch one of these feisty fish! Since they are vulnerable to over harvest, maybe AGFC could do their part to protect them by reducing the limit to 6 fish and having a 6 inch minimum length.

 

[WestCentralFisher]

I have a bit of a thing for goggle-eye, not because they're especially fun to catch (at least after the first couple seconds where they try to make you think you hooked a 15 pound flathead catfish) or because I like to eat them, but because in almost all cases in my experience, the presence of a decent population of them in Missouri indicates a relatively high quality Ozark stream. 

I've caught lots of smallmouth bass in some streams that had some serious water quality issues, or were muddy most of the year, etc, but I've never really caught goggle-eye in those streams, or if I did, there weren't very many. Their distribution is also weirdly random even outside of that. For example, the Big Niangua is one of the better fisheries for them I've encountered, but I've never caught one just one watershed over in the Little Niangua, which otherwise seems to have excellent habitat. There are goggle eye below Tunnel Dam on Big Niangua (the lowest barrier to fish migration) and a number of other LOZ tributaries in reasonable proximity.

So they have the habitat and the means to get there, but they just don't live there for some unknown reason. Or at least if they do, I haven't found them. These are the sort of little things that fascinate me more than they should as a fisherman. 

[fishinwrench]

4 hours ago, WestCentralFisher said:

but I've never caught one just one watershed over in the Little Niangua, which otherwise seems to have excellent habitat

Me either.   Nor any other Lake O feeder.  The Niangua is it. 

Tavern creek, below bagnell, is loaded with'em. 

 

[WestCentralFisher]

48 minutes ago, fishinwrench said:

Me either.   Nor any other Lake O feeder.  The Niangua is it. 

Tavern creek, below bagnell, is loaded with'em. 

 

Yeah, now that I think about it, one of the stream systems I was thinking of does feed in below the dam. I do know one other (indirect) LOZ feeder with a good population, but I was only given one-off permission to fish there, and to my knowledge there is no public access. Nice little creek, though. 

[tjm]

Rock bass may be indicative of a stream's health but I wouldn't say that lack of rock bass is indicative of the stream not being healthy. They are kinda like brown trout,  you find them where they are. 

If you look at USGS map of where rockbass were indigenous, it sure looks like most of them in Mo. have been relocated or their range has expanded over time. It doesn't really show them in  the Ozarks prior to WW2, but of course they say that their information may not be accurate as to time of spread. However, expanding range whether moved by man or naturally does explain why some streams have them and some don't. 

Quote

Rock Bass were extensively stocked in Missouri by state personnel during the 1930s and 1940s (Pflieger 1997).

 I was told many years ago by a guy that worked at a hatchery  there, that Arkansas had stocked goggle eye in the Sugar Creeks (Elk/Neosho) in the '50s.  I presumed from the hatchery location that they may have been taken from the White. But, I've also read someplace that there is some doubt that Ar. had any rock bass originally, so without hatchery records, for all that I can tell,  all the goggle eye may have been imported from NY or IL or ? Lots of fish got moved around back in the 1880s and since. 

[Al Agnew]

4 minutes ago, tjm said:

Rock bass may be indicative of a stream's health but I wouldn't say that lack of rock bass is indicative of the stream not being healthy. They are kinda like brown trout,  you find them where they are. 

If you look at USGS map of where rockbass were indigenous, it sure looks like most of them in Mo. have been relocated or their range has expanded over time. It doesn't really show them in  the Ozarks prior to WW2, but of course they say that their information may not be accurate as to time of spread. However, expanding range whether moved by man or naturally does explain why some streams have them and some don't. 

 I was told many years ago by a guy that worked at a hatchery  there, that Arkansas had stocked goggle eye in the Sugar Creeks (Elk/Neosho) in the '50s.  I presumed from the hatchery location that they may have been taken from the White. But, I've also read someplace that there is some doubt that Ar. had any rock bass originally, so without hatchery records, for all that I can tell,  all the goggle eye may have been imported from NY or IL or ? Lots of fish got moved around back in the 1880s and since. 

There is a theory that rock bass (and the other Ambloplites species) were not native to the Gasconade and Osage river systems.  In looking at the range maps in Pflieger's book, it shows the Niangua as the farthest west they range, and not the Little Niangua.  If you look at the connections between river systems, it would make sense that they might be native to the Meramec system but not to the Gasconade or Osage, because they would have to traverse the Missouri River to get to them, and it's believed that the Missouri was always too turbid to give them an avenue but that the far less muddy upper Mississippi diluted the mud in the Missouri enough for them to travel it past the Missouri into the Meramec.  The fact that it IS rock bass, and not the other two Ozark species, that populate the Gasconade and Osage, would either mean that they ARE native, or that the goggle-eye in those two streams came from Meramec fish.  It would be interesting to see an in depth study of their genetics.

Ozark bass have to be native, since the upper White is the only place they are found.  And shadow bass are found across the Mississippi from the southern Ozarks and Ouachitas in Arkansas, so they are probably native there. 

[tjm]

3 minutes ago, Al Agnew said:

Ozark bass have to be native, since the upper White is the only place they are found

Are the genetics so different that we can say how long ago that they evolved?