Monthly Archives: July 2022

Why Does Virginia Says NO to Alabama Bass


From Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries
from The Fishing Wire

What are Alabama Bass?

Alabama Bass (Micropetrus henshallii) are one of approximately twelve species of black bass. They are an aggressive species that outcompetes Largemouth Bass and readily hybridizes with Smallmouth and Spotted Bass. Alabama Bass are nearly identical in appearance to Spotted Bass, and were formerly known as the Alabama subspecies of the Spotted Bass. The other former subspecies of Spotted Bass, the Kentucky Spotted Bass, is found throughout Virginia and is native to the southwest portion of the Commonwealth.

The jaw of Alabama Bass lines up with the middle rear of the eye, while Largemouth Bass jaws extend past the eye. Alabama Bass have a dark, blotchy lateral band from head to tail, and have spots below this band. Largemouth Bass have a more continuous lateral band. Alabama Bass also typically have a tooth patch on their tongue, which is rare in Largemouth Bass. Alabama and Spotted Bass are differentiated by differences in lateral line scale counts or genetic analysis.

Where are Alabama Bass found?

Alabama Bass are native to Georgia and Alabama, occurring primarily in large river systems and large impoundments. Alabama Bass are confirmed to be present in Lake Gaston, Claytor Lake, Philpott Lake, and Martinsville Reservoir. They are suspected to be present in Diascund Reservoir and possibly other lakes. The Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (DGIF) is conducting genetic testing to better identify the extent of Alabama Bass throughout Virginia.

Why are Alabama Bass a concern in Virginia?

Alabama Bass represent a tremendous threat to Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass fisheries. Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass are Virginia’s most popular angling targets, with more than 60% of anglers targeting either species over the course of a fishing season. Largemouth and Smallmouth Bass fisheries in Virginia are valued in the millions of dollars. Declines in either population will result in not only the loss of sportfishing opportunities, but in economic harm to the region.

As an invasive species, Alabama Bass are capable of outcompeting Largemouth Bass, causing declines in abundance. For example, in Lake Norman, North Carolina, the relative abundance of Largemouth Bass decreased to less than 8% of their former abundance following the introduction of Alabama Bass. Declines in Largemouth abundance seem to be most pronounced in lakes that are relatively clear and which have limited vegetation. Systems in Virginia such as Smith Mountain Lake, Lake Anna, South Holston Reservoir, and Lake Moomaw are likely to see declines of Largemouth Bass populations if Alabama Bass are introduced into those waterbodies.

Alabama Bass also can hybridize with Smallmouth or Spotted Bass, often resulting in loss of the genetically pure Smallmouth Bass population. This occurred in Chatuge Reservoir, Georgia and North Carolina, and Nottely Reservoir, Georgia. Smallmouth Bass populations in lakes such as Smith Mountain and Moomaw, as well as in rivers such as the James and Shenandoah, might undergo a similar fate following introduction of Alabama Bass.

Although large Alabama Bass may appear for a few years following introduction, this situation is short lived and occurs primarily when population densities are low. Once established, Alabama Bass populations often increase to the point where stunting occurs, resulting in greater abundance of smaller bass. Fisheries are likely to shift from being dominated by 2–3 lb Largemouth or Smallmouth Bass to being dominated by 1 lb Alabama Bass.

What can you do?

Anglers are the primary vector for the spread of Alabama Bass in Virginia. Current populations are the results of angler introductions that have occurred over the last ten years.

Anglers are reminded that it is illegal to stock fish into a public body of water without an authorization from the DGIF. Anyone with knowledge of intentional stockings of Alabama or Spotted Bass should contact DGIF law enforcement at 800-237-5712 or WildCrime@dgif.virginia.gov.

Anglers who suspect they have captured an Alabama Bass should take a picture of the fish, clip off a thumbnail-sized portion of one of the pelvic fins, and store the fin clip dry in an envelope. The pelvic fins are located on the bottom of the fish, just under the head. They should then either contact the DGIF at fisheries@dgif.virginia.gov or at 804-367-1293.

Flint River Bass Club Fishing At Lake Oconee In 2017

 Two weeks ago 13 Flint River Bass club members and one youth fished our June tournament at Lake Oconee. We landed 23 keeper bass longer than the 14-inch minimum size that weighed about 41 pounds.  There was one limit and two members did not catch a keeper.

    Niles Murray wore us all out with a limit weighing 12.49 pounds and had big fish with a 3.99 pound largemouth.  My three at 5.34 pounds was second, Wes Delay placed third with two weighing 4.53 pounds and Don Gober was fourth with two at 4.34 pounds. 

    Harrison Edge, fishing with dad Ryan, won the youth division with two keepers weighing 2.22 pounds.  We allow youth to fish all our club tournaments with no entry fee and they compete only with other youth.  Any youth catching fish win a prize package rather than cash.

    Last Saturday 16 member of the Potato Creek Bassmasters fished our June tournament at Oconee.  We landed 26 keeper bass weighing about 49 pounds.  There was one limit and four members zeroed.

    Ryan Edge won with five weighing 9.27 pounds.  Donnie Willis placed second with four at 7.97 pounds and Jack Ridgeway came in third with four at 7.07 pounds.  William Scott placed fourth with three weighing 7.13 pounds and had big fish with a 3.60  pound largemouth, and my two weighing 3.5 pounds was good for fifth.

    Last Tuesday I went back to Oconee with Brad Stalnaker, a local tournament fisherman that knows the lake well. We fished nine hours in the rain getting information for the August Georgia Outdoor News Map of the Month article.

    The day was perfect for throwing a buzzbait on shallow grassbeds and seawalls, Brad’s favorite way to fish in the summer.  We landed about six keepers and Brad had one that weighed about 3.5 pounds.  Even with the good conditions, fishing was tough. I landed one keeper.  I am seeing a disturbing downhill pattern on Oconee for me, and the Sportsman Club is fishing it today.

    In the first tournament, I landed 11 bass under the 14-inch minimum size limit and just three keepers.  In the second one I had a dozen short fish and only two keepers.  With Brad I landed about eight short fish but only one keeper.

    I hope the fishing for keepers is better for me today and does not follow the pattern. If it does I won’t catch a keeper!  I am torn trying to decide whether to fish my pattern that produced five keepers in two trips or Brads that produced more keepers, but the conditions were very different.

    Lake Oconee is getting as bad as Lanier with all the big off-shore boats running around.  It is hard to fish after about 10:00 AM with huge waves rocking the boat and crashing into the bank.

    I hope it rains all day today!

Tracking Sailfish Off the South Carolina Coast

FEATURE
By SCDNR biologist Wally Bubley
(originally published on North Carolina Sea Grant’s blog, Hook, Line & Science)
from The Fishing Wire

Using pop-up satellite tags, scientists can get a much better understanding of billfish movement and migration.

Research Need

Typically, researchers measure the movement of large, offshore pelagic fish using traditional streamer tags, but to get information, the fish must be caught again. This method only provides information on the tagging and recapture locations, but no information about what the fish did in between, including movements up and down the water column.

Ideally, to get the best understanding of how, where, and why a species interacts with its environment — and ultimately where to fish for it — a 3D map would incorporate depth with high-resolution horizontal movement.

What did we study?

We used pop-up satellite tags to track the movement of billfish caught in South Carolina Governor’s Cup tournaments. These tags capture the 3D location while attached, using sunlight and pressure sensors. The tags pop off at pre-programmed times and, once at the surface, transmit information to satellites and ultimately to the researcher.

We then used this information to provide a 3D model of movement.

What did we find?

One species of billfish (sailfish) off the coast of South Carolina moves seasonally and tends to stay closer to shore. But sailfish will venture offshore, too, including as far north as New Jersey and as far south as the northern coast of South America.

The depths through which fish travel change throughout the day and potentially during different types of movements, such as whether the fish are migrating or staying in an area to feed.

Overall, by tracking depth, we can capture a more complete picture of what these fish are doing and how they interact with their environment and with other species, which we might miss otherwise.

Anything else?

The advantage of satellite tags over streamer tags was apparent in one sailfish especially. This fish, tagged off the South Carolina coast, traveled to Turks and Caicos before returning to within 150 miles of where it originally was tagged, before its tag finally surfaced.

If this study had used a typical streamer tag on this fish, the only information we would have gathered is that this fish covered the same amount of area that a garden snail could cover over the same time period. Obviously, we would have assumed that likely something more happened with our fish, but without data to know what. Using the satellite tag, however, revealed the fish was much more active.

So what?

Depth plays an important role in limiting competition for food between sailfish and other species. Knowing these differences is especially important in some commercial fisheries, which can be a major source of mortality.

Understanding sailfish and other billfish movement patterns can allow for management and fishing practices that target only the species of interest, while minimizing interactions with billfish species, in turn making them more available to recreational fishermen.

Reading

Walter J. Bubley, Benjamin Galuardi, Amy W. Dukes, and Wallace E. Jenkins’s “Incorporating depth into habitat use descriptions for sailfish Istiophorus platypterus and habitat overlap with other billfishes in the western North Atlantic,” in Marine Ecology Progress Series, Vol. 638: 137–148 2020, https://doi.org/10.3354/meps13239.

Summary compiled by Walter Bubley
Lead photo by SCDNR

NOAA Fisheries, the Guy Harvey Ocean Foundation, and the SC Governor’s Cup Billfishing Series provided support for this research.

The text from Hook, Line & Science is available to reprint and republish, but only in its entirety and with this attribution: Hook, Line & Science, courtesy of Scott Baker and Sara Mirabilio, North Carolina Sea Grant. HookLineScience.com

Cut Grass Or Go Fishing

 The sound of lawnmowers, weed eaters and blowers often disrupt the peace while I am fishing.  Those are both sounds I did not hear in my early years.  We had rakes and hoes, not leaf blowers and weed eaters, and many of the folks I knew had brush brooms, not lawnmowers. Their yards were dirt, not grass.

    If anyone wasted time and effort on a lawn, they did it with an old push reel grass cutter.  I had the “pleasure” of using one of those a few times in my preteen years but could never really push them hard or fast enough to make it work very well.

    By the time I was 13 we did have a nice lawn.  The year before my parents had torn down the old farm house we had lived in for 12 years, building a nice split level brick house on the same lot.  Termites in the old house sped up the need for my mom’s dream house and my parents went way out on a mortgage limb to build it, something they did not believe in.  Borrowing money was not something they wanted to do and going into debt was much less common 55 years ago than it is now.

    The old farm house had a huge living room and kitchen in front and two bedrooms and a bathroom in the back.  All the way in the back was a bedroom, a small kitchen and bathroom that my grandmother lived in for several years.  I think those are now called mother-in-law suites.

    We tore down the front half of the old house and lived in the back rooms while the new house was being built within feet of those rooms. When we tore down the old house we found the floor beams were hand hewn pine logs. The ax marks were plainly visible on them.

    The old section had a big fireplace and chimney.  My dad, being frugal, had us tear it down and chip off the old mortar and he sold the bricks. I was weird to me that folks would pay so much for old bricks that we could buy about ten times as many new ones with the money.

    Daddy decided to plant carpet grass since he had seen some pretty lawns of it in Florida.  It was delivered to our house in sod pieces about two feet wide and three feet long.  Rather than place those pieces for an instant lawn, my frugal dad made us pull it apart and plant sprigs in shallow furrows. That was a hot, tiring job but within a couple of years we had our thick carpet of grass.

    That grass required a good lawn mower and dad got a gas-powered push mower. I spent many hours struggling to crank it then slowly pushing it along. We had a big yard and it took several hours to cut it all.

    One of my friend’s dad was a sergeant in the Army and was very strict.  As punishment, he made my friend cut grass – with scissors!  He would be told to take the scissors out and cut for an hour to punish him for misbehavior. That would probably be called child abuse now but it taught him discipline.  I never had to do that, at least.

    Its funny now that I hate cutting grass in my yard although it is small and takes less than an hour. But I like going to the farm and cutting with the rotary mower for several hours at a time.  I guess it is knowing I am getting ready to hunt the field after getting it plowed and planting winter wheat.

Cooking and Camping Growing Up

 The smell of bacon frying over a campfire made my stomach growl.  That enticing smell, mixed with the aroma of wet canvass, was a staple of our “wilderness” camping trip in the woods a couple of hundred yards

behind Harold’s house.  Although we camped like this several times each summer, each one was special.

    I was glad we had taken precautions and made a lean-to cover of an old tarp to keep firewood dry in the rain.  The lower end was stacked with everything needed from twigs to sticks of firewood cut with our hatchets, and the upper end was high enough to shelter the fire from the falling water that seemed to mark every trip. Our Cub Scout and Royal Ambassador training paid off.

    Last night we had tried to stay awake all night, but as usual sometimes during the dark we gave up our talking and drifted off to sleep.  It was not always easy to go to sleep in the army surplus pup tent with a ground tarp. No matter how hard we tried to remover them all, we always left some sticks and rocks to poke us through our sleeping bags. They seemed to grow during the night.

    When we first woke in the dim green haze of tent light our voices sounded strange as they always did early in the morning.  They took on quality never heard anywhere else.  And there was the usual treat of a rainy morning.  Small puddles had formed on the ground tarp where water had worked under the edge of the tent.  Those puddles made an interesting game of floating our mess kit pans and making them spin when we tried to eat inside sheltered from the rain.

    A mess kit contained all our necessities.  The knife, fork and spoon clipped together with two small brads to hold them in a stack.  The frying pan handle swung over the pan holding them together, making a container to hold the small pot with a top and coffee cup. 

    Perfectly cooked bacon, eggs and toast at home never seemed to taste as good as strips of bacon half burned in the middle and rubbery on the ends, scrambled eggs that ranged from watery to too dry, and toast with black burned areas.  Cooking over an open fire was a slowly acquired skill and we were not there yet. 

    Coffee was not as good as at home, though. We all tried to drink it black with a little sugar but missed the cream that was mixed about half and half with coffee at home. Without no way to keep it cool, cream or milk was not an option on those trips.

    The night before we had cooked our favorite dinner on the coals.  We called it a “Hobo” meal and it was perfect for a camping trip. Before leaving home, we had made a huge ground beef patty and placed it in the center of a square of tinfoil.  On top of the meat went a slice of onion, then slices of potato. Sliced carrots topped the pile of food then a big chunk of butter was placed on it.  A little salt and pepper finished up the preparation.

    The edges of the tinfoil were pulled up and twisted into a seal to keep it all together. If the tinfoil was formed perfectly, and we didn’t poke a hole in the bottom when placing them on the coals that were carefully drug from the main fire, they would cook evenly and be floating in butter.  But we seldom had any butter when the tinfoil was opened.  At least we did not have a plate to wash, the tinfoil served fine.

    We never camped for more than one night. We had to go home to get some sleep, put iodine on the inevitable cuts and scrapes and Watkins Salve on the ever-present chigger bites.  It was also a lot easier to wash up our mess kits at home. We had only one each and although we tried various cleaning methods in the woods none worked very well. And we had to dry out tent, tarps and sleeping bags.

    After carefully covering the fire pit with the same Army surplus folding foxhole shovels we had dug it with, we packed up our gear into army surplus duffel bags.  We would not have survived without Army surplus equipment!

    The trip home seemed to be miles longer that the trip to the campsite.  Although everything was usually heavier from water at the end of the trip, I think our hearts were the heaviest load since the trek home meant the camping trip was over.