i caught a small bass about 11" long in my pond earlier this week and noticed it had a small patch of teeth on it his tongue. when i fished local tournaments back years ago the lmb size limit was 16" but a spotted bass was allowed to be kept at 12". the patch of teeth on their tongue was what the officials used to determine if it was a spot or not. we did catch a fish rarely that had teeth on its tongue but didn't look anything like a spot. anyone know what this is actually an identifier of?

Some LMB do have a tooth patch on tongue. I made hybrids a while back and they had the patch. Patch may indicate Spotted Bass in wood pile.

The natural world is not as black and white presented in rule books.

i was wondering if great grandpa might have been a spot. that sure would take away from the credibility of the supplier though. these are f1 "tiger bass" supposedly.

When you start talking pure representative of given species, we are finding things are getting much fuzzier with hybridization event frequently being impactful to one or both species involved. Even humans we are seeing are not escaping that. The events can be many, many generations back.

I would treat the bass you purchased as pure. If producer knowingly crossed then issue to be had but why cross Spotted with LMB?

i agree, no reason to cross them. but if they are a cross, then someone isn't doing their part with quality assurance.

i had some large bg delivered to my old pond once after an otter hit the pond. the bg were guaranteed to be pure cnbg. i instantly saw one that was a regular bg and pointed it out to him. he agreed and said he had no idea where it came from. said he had only stocked cnbg in all his ponds for the last 15 years. it was late in the day when he got to my house. he brought them in the tank of his electro fishing boat. i think he had shocked them up from someone else pond and sold them to me. i didn't have a real problem with it since i already had some native bg in there. but that wasn't the deal we had agreed on. he was going to bring them from his stock ponds.

That is an uh oh.

Not knowing your vendor and how he/she operates, I will say keeping BG straight is going to be tough if more than one subspecies is on a farm. Cross contamination can be difficult to control when herons move stuff around and raceways used for grading and prepping fish to be shipped are close together. That does not even consider having both types in a hauler at same time.

If I were getting stockers then a year to good harvest would sacrificed. Fully adult fish in good health would be purchased. That means paying top dollar for 8" or better fish. It would not take many to get exceptional cohorts of young coming off once the breeding commences.

Jim I have used the adult stocking method before and it is preferred if available. It is essential to have trusted sources. Unfortunately most pond owners don't have that option due to time/cost/availability issues. There are a few exceptions however. It is hard enough for us to warn people about the risks of fish trucks , bucket stocking and fly-by-night-hatcheries.

when i was having otter problems at the old pond, it was almost impossible to find anyone that would even supply a 5" bluegill. the guy that brought those bg is very well known (i won't mention his name) and respected. like i said earlier, i already had native bg and cnbg, but our conversation was that he was to bring me straight cnbg from his place. he might have, but i will always suspect he shocked them up from an earlier job that day.

as far as my new pond. it is stocked with cnbg only and i have never seen any native bg at all. the lmb with teeth on their tongue look nothing like a spot, but it sure made me wonder. the bass are doing super, especially the ones that will take pellets. One of my employees caught the fattest/healthiest 19" bass that ever lived a few weeks ago here. i have got to get another set of scales. i sure wish i knew what that one weighed.

Performance overrides purity. What does purity of a pond population in the greater scheme of things? Most pond populations are effectively dead ends. Ask what I mean on that.

Go ahead - it will be interesting and no doubt there will be ideas from many perspectives. I know I have ask those questions of many experts and gotten very different answers and even some "you must be kidding me responses" when I told them that other FS may not agree..