Pond Boss Forums STOCKING A NEW POND Types of fish to choose Creating Trophy Bass in 3 years

Hold that Tigress
All female bass stock gives anglers a better shot at a trophy

By John E. Phillips
Contributing Writer
June 01. 2005 3:15AM
- Last modified: June 06. 2005 5:11PM

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Imagine a lake with only 6-pound or larger bass. New research now makes this possible.

Trying to figure out how to produce a trophy-bass pond quickly and inexpensively has haunted Don Keller and Barry Smith, owners of American Sport Fish Hatchery in Montgomery, for years. But, this year they’ve developed a solution that can make trophy-bass fishing not only possible, but available to small-pond owners at a very-reasonable price.

“We’ve learned that if we can stock all female bass, we can produce a trophy-bass lake in 3 years,” Smith explains.

When a female bass spawns, she produces 50-percent males and 50-percent females. Since males seldom exceed 4 pounds in weight, regardless of the genetic stock, half of those fish will never reach trophy potential. That’s the primary difficulty in producing a pond with all trophy bass.

In other words, in a lake’s initial stocking 50 percent of the bass don’t have the ability to grow to trophy size. As female bass reproduce in that pond, more and more male bass that can’t reach trophy potential are introduced into the pond. Each year, the number of male bass increases.

To keep a lake in balance, anglers or pond managers must remove bass each year to make room for the new bass just spawned. The larger the lake, the more difficult it is to keep the lake at or below its carrying capacity.

In a well-balanced fertile pond that’s built in good soils with an original stocking of quality bass, you usually need to remove 25 to 30 pounds of bass per year per acre. But every lake has different properties and harvest requirements, and each lake needs a prescription for bass harvest based on a number of factors. Generally, the older a lake, the more small bass it will have in it, and the fewer trophy bass.

Based on water and soil quality, the amount of forage and the type and the quality of bass initially stocked in a lake, fishery scientists can tell how many pounds of bass that lake potentially can grow each year. That number is not the same as the number of bass that the lake can hold per year.

For instance, if a lake has a carrying capacity of 100 pounds of bass per acre, this number means that the acre can carry one, 100-pound bass, or four, 25-pound bass, or, 10, 10-pound bass. A 3-year-old pond may have hundreds of small bass in it, including 4- to 6-inch-long bass, another year class 6- to 8-inches long, and a third year class 8- to 10-inches long. To arrive at the total of 100 pounds of bass per acre, it’s necessary to add up the weight of all these small bass.

To have a trophy bass fishery, it’s necessary to remove most of the small bass and leave only the larger bass. Removing the small bass every year means expending time and labor as well as incurring costs, especially if electrofishing is used to accomplish this task.

In a perfect world, anglers could buy female bass that weigh 6- to 12-pounds each and stock only those female bass in their ponds. It would be easier to maintain a trophy-bass lake. Fishermen would simply catch and release those big females that don’t reproduce because the pond has no males. They could continue to keep the water quality in good condition, the pond fertile and the pond full of forage fish for your bass. However, few people can afford the cost of creating a pond like this or find and buy 10 female bass that weigh 10-pounds each or 20, 5-pound female bass to put in a 1-acre pond.

However, just stocking female bass won’t solve the trophy-bass problem completely. To produce bass that weigh from 6- to 10-pounds each in three to four years, the females stocked in the lake must come from brood stock of extremely large bass.

“To stock a lake for trophy production, I’d stock all females that were produced from females that weighed 10 pounds or more each,” Smith explains. “I’d also want the females that I stocked into my trophy pond to come from a male bass that had been produced by a trophy-female bass. This way both the male and the female that produced the female offspring for stocking would have trophy bass on both sides of their parentage.”

A Florida stream female largemouth used to breed Tigress bass swims in American Sport Fish Hatchery's tank. The genetically engineeredproduce only female offspring.
Research has proven that scientists can genetically engineer fish to produce only females. Taking this scientific research and applying this technology to the bass in American Sport Fish’s hatchery breeding program, Keller and Smith are genetically engineering a strain of all-female bass. At their hatchery, Smith and Keller have kept detailed records of the breeding programs on the bass they’ve produced.

“Once we have an initial stocking of all female bass, we’ll put 20 of these females in one of our research ponds to watch and record their growth rate,” Smith explains. “Currently we have three, 3-year-old research ponds stocked only with female bass. We’ve seen an exceptional growth on these fish of 4 pounds in the first year. This growth rate has occurred in both the Florida strain of black bass stocked in one pond and the northern strain of black bass stocked in another pond.

“Then the second year, the growth rate slows down. However, at the end of two years, individual bass in each of these ponds will weigh more than 6-pounds each. By the third year as the number of female bass approaches the carrying capacity of the pond, all the bass have shown good growth, with some individuals weighing more than 8-pounds each.”

Initially, American Sport Fish stocked these lakes at 25 bass per acre. At the end of three years, the bass in the pond weighed from 6- to 8-pounds each, a phenomenal growth rate but not the upper-end potential of how many pounds a bass could put on in a year.

“With an abundance of food, we know that a bass that weighs 4 pounds one year can gain an additional 4 pounds the second year,” Smith reports.

For many years, scientists believed that when bass reached a certain age, their growth rate slowed down. However, Texas Parks and Wildlife put a 12-pound bass in a study tank that they fed so much food that the bass gained an additional 4 pounds in one year, although probably not a realistic-growth rate for bass in a farm pond. Holding and feeding this 12-pound bass in a tank and providing as much forage as the fish would eat contributed to the weight gain.

Stocking 25 bass in a 1-acre pond, at the end of three years, some of the 25 bass will have died.

“We know from natural mortality studies that there will be less than 20 bass in the lake after three years,” Smith says. “However, to compensate for natural mortality and for fishing mortality, several more female bass can be introduced to the lake every year to keep the population numbers at about 25-female trophy bass per acre.”

If you manage a pond like this for three years, you’ll more than likely have a pond with a higher density of trophy bass than any other waters in America. Therefore, you’ll have an extremely-high likelihood of catching a bass that weighs from 6 to 8 pounds or more, especially if the trophy females stocked in the lake have come from a Tiger Bass breeding, which means biologists have bred those females for aggressiveness as well as to gain weight quickly.

“These females aren’t sterile,” Smith warns. “If you want to have a trophy-bass-only lake, you may have to remove some of the non-sterile females to keep the growth going beyond the 10- to 12-pound range per bass. Remember, if you exceed the carrying capacity of the lake, the growth rate of the bass will dramatically decrease.”

The future of recreational bass fishing may very well be in stocking ponds with only selectively-bred female bass because
n These bass grow at a faster rate than non-genetically engineered bass
n Bass grow to trophy sizes much quicker than they do standard stocking and management practices
n The likelihood of catching a trophy bass in ponds stocked and managed for females only is far greater than in a pond that contains both male and female bass.

Barry Smith, Co-owner of American Sport fish Hachery, holds up a 5-pound Tigress. It took the fish only two years to obtain this weight.
However, pond owners stocking only female bass in a lake or a pond, must make sure there’s no inflow of water that gives a male bass access to that pond. One male bass in a pond full of females, will breed some of the female bass. That will eventually create a pond full of mature.

Even if that happens, by the time natural reproduction starts, hopefully the pond will have built up a large number of trophy female bass. Because of the possibility of a male bass getting into an all-female pond, not every lake or pond is a good candidate for an all-female bass-stocking program.

A new lake that never has had bass offers the best results. Pond owners can supplement their initial stocking every year with a certain number of additional female fingerlings. This keeps a new crop of younger-age-class female bass coming along every year.

Keller and Smith say that American Sport Fish’s Tigress Bass stocking program allows pond owners to determine the size and number of bass anglers can catch from their ponds. For instance, angler who only want to catch 8- to 10-pound bass from their pond can use a relatively-low stocking rate. Those who prefer to catch 6- to 8-pound bass can increase the stocking rate and thereby increase the number of bass available to catch.

Depending on the number of Tigress Bass in the pond or lake initially and the number of fish you add each year, anglers can adjust the size and number of bass they catch.

American Sport Fish will offer only Tigress Bass females for stocking from the Tiger Bass hybrid that American Sport Fish has developed. The genetic makeup of these Tigresses not only will include the ability to grow at a rapid rate over a short time but also the tendency to eat pelleted food and have much-more aggressive behavior than other bass, especially the tight-lipped Florida bass.

“Although most anglers are familiar with the Florida bass and how rapidly it grows, research has proved that the Florida strain of largemouth bass, after it reaches a weight of 4 to 5 pounds, is much-more reluctant to bite artificial lures than the northern strain of largemouth bass,” Smith says. “The genetics we’ve bred into these Tigress Bass have come from sires that have been the most-aggressive northern bass in our breeding program and have demonstrated exceptional weight-gaining potential.

This creates a bass that will gain weight like a Florida bass but will demonstrate the aggressive characteristics of a northern largemouth.

“A 16-pound bass swimming around in someone’s pond that no one can catch has very little value to the pond owner,” Smith says. “One very-important factor to remember here is for the Tigress Bass to reach her genetic potential, there must be plenty of forage in the lake or pond, and the pond must be well-managed.

“If you have one of the best cows that money can buy and put it out in a poor pasture, that cow never will meet its genetic potential. For that cow to be all it can be, it has to have plenty of lush grass and hay, and that food must be available whenever the cow is ready to eat. The same principle is true when you’re growing trophy bass.”

A Tigress Bass needs a well-managed pond with plenty of forage to reach her full potention. In that environment the Tigress can gain up to 3 pounds a year for several years.

The Tigress Bass cost from $3 to $5 each, depending on the number of fish available and the size of the fish at the time of sale. While the price seems high, the fish have a much-lower stocking rate.

A limited number of Tigresses went on the prowl nationwide during the spring of ‘05. The high demand for these new bass means that pond owners may have to order Tigresses a year in advance. All these bass will come with certificates that certify their breeding and the fact that they are female bass.

John Phillips is a freelance writer living in Birmingham.