Because of their recreational and economic importance, largemouth bass are probably the most-studied fish in Texas. While Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) biologists and researchers lead research efforts, some of the most valuable studies would not have been possible without the help of anglers.
By far the most visible and long-lived research program involving anglers is the Budweiser ShareLunker program, which has been on-going since 1986. In an effort to improve the quality of fishing in Texasâand perhaps produce the next world record largemouth bassâTPWD uses 13-pound-plus females for spawning and stocks the resulting offspring into public waters.
Any angler can tell you 13-pound bass aren’t found in every bush in a lake. In fact, during the past 21 years, only 450 fish have been entered into the programâand every single one of those fish was donated or loaned to TPWD by the angler who caught it. (Of those fish, 449 were females and one was male, a 6-pounder that was the largest male largemouth ShareLunker program director David Campbell had ever seen.)
Besides being scarce, big fish tend to live in deep water where the main method biologists normally use for collecting fish for research, electrofishing, simply does not work. “Electrofishing using shocking boats is good for collecting small fish, but it only works in water less than about 8 feet deep,” says Dave Terre, TPWD’s Chief of Research and Management. That’s where anglers come in. “Using fish collected by anglers saves time and money, gives much better coverage of a lake and provides us with the larger fish that are hard to collect by shocking. Without anglers, we would never be able to collect enough large fish to conduct some of the studies we’ve done,” Terre points out.
Campbell calls the anglers who donate fish to the ShareLunker program “the best conservationists in Texas” and says he is humbled by their attitude. “One of the biggest things I’ve learned from this program is that people who fish want to help TPWD,” he says. “Anglers have made this program. They want to donate and help sportfishing. I’ve never met one of those people who was mad at TPWDâI may meet someone at midnight at a boat ramp to pick up a fish, and he has his friends there with him, and they are all smiling. Getting to deal with those folks makes my job the best job in TPWD.”
Other biologists might feel their job is best. One is Todd Driscoll, a fisheries biologist whose territory includes Sam Rayburn Reservoir, the largest reservoir totally within the state and a prime destination for both recreational and tournament anglers, hosting about 300 tournaments a year. “I got into this field because of my love of fishing, particularly bass fishing,” Driscoll says. “I started participating in tournaments several years ago. I fish three tournament trails and belong to two different bass clubs. Being a serious angler helps me do my job better, because I see anglers’ point of view. I think angler opinions should drive fisheries management activities, as long as they make good biological sense. Anglers are our constituents, and we should manage for the kinds of activities they desire.”
Fittingly, Driscoll turned to anglers for help on two ground-breaking studies he helped conduct on Sam Rayburn. “The first study used results from bass tournaments to supplement our existing database on largemouth bass populations in Sam Rayburn and Toledo Bend reservoirs,” Driscoll says. “The information we gather using electrofishing and creel surveys is biased, because neither provides us with much information on large bass abundance.” Driscoll regularly harvests data posted by bass clubs and tournaments. “That information is incorporated into the management plans we write,” he says. “This allows us to make more informed, better management decisions that ultimately provide anglers with better fishing.”
A case in point was an exploitation study Driscoll and colleague Jay Smith conducted on Sam Rayburn in 2004. “Exploitation means removal of fish by anglers,” Driscoll explains. “We asked anglers what they thought of our current 14-inch length limit on bass. Half wanted a more restrictive limit. In order to determine how that regulation would work and how much benefit it would provide, we had to know what percent of the overall fish population in the lake is removed by anglers each year.”
With the help of biologists from across the state, about 6,000 largemouth bass were electrofished and tagged. Over the next year, anglers were asked to report each tagged fish they caught. “We found that only 6 percent of the bass were taken home to be eaten, and only about 5 percent were caught by tournament anglers and taken to a weigh-in,” Driscoll says. “While the latter group of fish were released, we estimate about 30 percent of them later died. Still, this represents only 1.5 percent of the total population. We concluded that a more restrictive regulationâa longer length limitâwould increase the abundance of 20-inch fish only 3 to 4 percent. Without the cooperation of anglers, we would not have been able to get this informationâand this had never been documented before. We interviewed some anglers as many as 30 times during the year. It took a lot of patience on their part to be interviewed so many times, but most of them were all for the study and were excited when they caught a tagged fish.”
Anglers can take comfort from one of the main findings of the study, that angler harvest is not limiting the number of big bass on Sam Rayburn. “This study told us we can’t use length limits to increase the quality of fish in Sam Rayburn,” Driscoll says. “Habitat and genetics are more important. In a large reservoir like this, we’re limited in what we can do to affect habitat, which makes more important our stocking of Florida largemouth bass to improve the genetics of the fish in the lake. Anglers helped us learn what we needed to know to make fishing better for them.”By: “>Larry D. Hodge, TPWD
