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We finished stocking our early spawn largemouth bass today. In 2011, we released 309,719 bass fry at Hillsdale Reservoir. The fish were placed in the best available habitat and we set block nets to limit access of larger fish that might prey on the fry. That gave the bass time to acclimate, start feeding, and escape most predators. One problem we had with Hillsdale is we were not able to mark these fish so we could identify stocked vs wild when we sample in future years. We are still having problems marking bass with OTC, a chemical mark we have used successfully on walleye. The young bass don't tolerate OTC for some unknown reason. The bass stocked at Hillsdale have about a one to two month head start on the 2011 wild bass.
We selected Cedar Bluff to be the site for early spawn fingerling bass stockings. This week we released approximately 110,000 fingerling bass some of which were marked with OTC and will help us determine the contribution the stocked fish made to the 2011 year class. We are very excited that we finally have some ability to evaluate this project. The biologists were very pleased as they observed bass feeding immediately upon release. These fish have about a 2 month head start on the wild bass at CDBR as the wild spawn hadn't started when we released fish this week. The gizzard shad spawn hasn't occurred yet either. That means the stocked bass will definitely be able to feed on shad immediately upon the start of the shad spawn, something the wild fish likely won't have the mouth gape to do this year.
We also selected a medium size lake with limited bass recruitment, Herington New City Lake. We released 100,000 bass fry. Those fish were some of the last spawned at the Meade Bass Propagation Facility, and should still have been at least 3 weeks ahead of the peak of the wild spawn.
Finally, we will be releasing some of the last bass spawned at Meade into the new Horse Thief Reservoir near Jetmore. They will be fingerling bass and should be stocked in about two weeks. We estimate about 25,000 fish for that effort.
All of our hatcheries contributed to the effort this year. All bass were spawned in the climate controlled facility at Meade. Pratt, Meade, and Farlington hatcheries all reared some fry to fingerlings in ponds, and Milford Hatchery and Meade handled the OTC marking effort.
The dedication our staff has to this project is amazing as the hatchery, research, and management biologists are all actively engaged doing everything possible to make it happen. I'll try to post some pictures of the project in the photo gallery for you to view.
The next step will be further evaluation of the past stockings and planning for next year's production effort. I'm happy to talk to anyone that wants more information on the project. Just give me a call or email me at doug.nyrgren@ksoutdoors.com.
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