Pond Boss Forums Thread Like Summary - Learned something about LMB

Spent Tues and Weds down helping our Black Bass Guru's at the hatchery. Tuesday am draining ponds I was watching as backs of fish started to appear.. within 30 minutes we were slinging nets up to the trucks with LMB that were in the 4-9lb range. Then the boss says lets head to the male pond and fill the other truck. 45 minutes or so later, we were transferring 4-7lb fish into truck #2.. I didn't ask any questions until we were back inside unloading pit tagged fish. I had about a 5.5lb bass in my net in salt dip waiting to be scanned and told which spawning tank to put this girl in when Hatchery Bio say "Boy", tank 4.. I'm like.. wth??? As it turns out I learned they don't even put a male into use until it reaches the 4 mark. I always believed males were seldom over 17" and maybe 3lbs max for northern bass. I was wrong. We scanned every fish and placed in 1 of 4 9,000 gal tanks/runs indoors and there wasn't a single fish under 4.5lbs
Weds was the day we moved fish that were either pit tagged as 3lb range or untagged fish needing sexed and tagged as new stock to finish the 100 pairs of breeders, so I got some hands-on for sexing and pit tagging.
Maybe not that big of a deal but I had a short convo with Lusk about these males and he was a bit surprised as well.
Next time I nail a 5-7lb LMB I will no longer just assume it to be one of the girls!

We used capillary tubes 75mm long. The fish is anesthetized, the tube is inserted in the inverted, sedated fish very carefully. when resistance is felt you apply your finger tip over the tube and extract. You either have a sign of egg or milt. it is 100% certainty. I learned there is a very delicate "feel" to going in far enough to get the results you need.
When the sex is determined, the fish is pit tagged, recorded and moved to freshwater containment. As long as fish returns to normal behavior it's placed in the spawning containment structure.

Rod: these are fish that come from previous years tank spawned fish, from Kansas. We sexed and tagged some new fish from Colorado on Wednesday that are grown from small fingerlings in the Kansas Hatchery systems. The only fish that are used are those that reach at least 4lbs, no tags no sexing until then.

The questions of Nature (Heritage/Genetics) and Nurture (Environment) will, I suppose, never be resolved. The arguments have been going on a long time. To be sure, both appear to have merit, but not in the absence of the other and not without variation (uncertainty).

Ketona Lake in Alabama yielded the two largest BG ever recorded. It did so with no management whatsoever. The BG in the lake were not naturally there. Ketona Lake was a pit mine that was abandoned and allow to fill from ground water. So the BG in the lake were probably stockings from a State or private hatchery .... but no different than the BG provided to many other impoundments. Yet Ketona Lake produced exceptional BG. Later, the DOW experimented with Ketona Lake BG to determine the difference that the genetics contributed to growth. What they found is that the Ketona Lake progeny had no genetic propensity to grow larger or faster than BG that they were selecting in their hatcheries. This particular case demonstrates the importance of environment for growth and ultimate weight. Without a conducive environment it is not possible to grow trophy fish.

Yet even in a conducive environment not all fish are equal. Some grow faster than others while some live longer than others while some strike artificial lures more frequently than others, etc. Fish, it seems, are individuals. This seems to have worked for millions of years for the LMB particularly. From time to time, I'll give thought to what makes fish grow faster. Whatever it may be, there is one variable that must be met. The energy/nutrient needs for such growth (plus any other metabolic consumption the fish has). So I have to wonder, is what differentiates fast growers from slower growers (growing in the same environment) mostly determined by how much they consume? Where a population shares an environment, is this determined by learning, hormones driving hunger response, inclination to various hunting strategy? To what extent does the last variable play in metabolic consumption requirements (conversion efficiency)? So the cause of variation among individuals may be rather complex, probably more complex than these traits alone.

Artificial selection focuses concentrating specific genes so that the progeny of succeeding generations possess the traits desired of the line. This is just a fancy way of saying that artificial selection is the art of "in-breeding". To be sure, any line that produces predictable traits in offspring has a high degree of inbreeding. What is lost are those traits that natural selection has historically favored.

Yet, in terms of benefits of artificial selection and the domestication of species, inbreeding dependable genetic lines to yield predictable traits can reduce the variability of the desired traits. For example, it can yield a line that produces offspring that are more likely to exhibit growth near the maximum with less variation about its mean. Now to be sure, there is no vacuum. The environment HAS to produce the food these fish require for this growth to occur. So how many give any thought to what this means for an initial stocking rate or culling rate for such artificially selected fish? The environment of anyone's water has a limit and if one is putting faster growers in, then they will more rapidly reach the environment's capacity.

We make a HUGE deal about genetics but most of the time that isn't what is limiting fisheries. More often, the environmental conditions are not conducive to growth and ultimate weights.

Debbie and I had 30 huge koi in one of our small ponds at LL,2. She loved the color, watching them dance around pond's edge during their spawning ritual, and the fact they showed up and could be seen. Me, on the other hand, really didn't want them becoming dominant with numbers. That pond worked out because we had enough bluegills in there (we fed the fish very well) to make sure any baby koi didn't have much chance to survive to adulthood.

I don't like the risk factor of using them as a forage fish. Even if 99% get eaten in a 10-15 acre lake, that means enough survive to start a population. At that point, you are trading problems. For us, Debbie wanted color. For me, I didn't want them to establish.

One other little factor...when koi are hatched, they are the same color as carp. Some change colors and become beautiful, others don't. We ended up with several carp-colored koi in our pond at LL,2.

I don't recommend them as forage in a bass fishing lake. It makes sense at a hatchery with total control.

An update to answer some questions here..
Yesterday I got to go finish sexing and pit tagging the remaining fish. I also got a lot more direct with some questions and I want to share the answers I was given.
I ask the hatchery manager about genetics and how he felt they fit in his program. He said genetics didn't really seem to play a huge role, but adding several thousand pounds of koi into a 1 acre male only, and a 1 acre female only pond, each containing between 100 and 150 fish makes it all happen.
I ask about conversion rates and this year, the conversion was just over 6lbs of Koi to produce 1lb of Bass, now, with that said, not a very big % of Koi are eaten on day 1 so some of those have some growing time and may weigh 2-3 times original stocking weight at the point of consumption, so there are other factors to what the true number would be in a hatchery vs a pond. But basically, the bass never has to work and therefore just grows.
I also found out our Manager there worked in Texas for the state before coming back to his home state. He made it clear that he brought some Texas knowledge in and applied as needed to make this facility what it is.
I also learned a bit more about our Hatchery chief bio there and found that he was a student of the late Dr. Willis and has a framed letter behind his desk that was written in regards to him being one of the best students he'd ever had the pleasure of having in a class and really looked forward to amazing work from him in his endeavors. So, I feel like these guys are pretty sharp guys and I believe them when they tell me they can't put anything else in the ponds to make LMB grow any faster than they do now. The biologist actually said the first 3 years they see males often growing faster than females.
I did find the comment about genetics a bit confusing but I think I understand a few things now that I didn't think about before this.
I might also add that as these ponds are drained to collect fish, there is another team present taking care of sorting the correct size Koi to go into the ponds these Bass will be put back into. The bigger Koi are removeable every year.

So I guess when it comes to sexing, size doesn't always matter. Oh-kay...

Rod, They don't put any fish into spawning tanks until mid Feb every year. These fish are held in 1 acre ponds as soon as eggs are collected in spawning mats, they go back to ponds. The primary forage for these are Koi. They raise Koi in separate ponds just for forage use and they dump a butt-load of Koi into each acre pond containing Females in one, Males in another. Several thousand pounds of Koi are used in each during the year. I talked to the Hatchery Bio today and ask about genetics. He says nothing special but they only tag fish above the 3 mark and if they make 4 the following year, they go into spawning tanks, but Koi is the key to their system. He says 5lbs on proper forage is no problem for a male and very common. Some of the fish we moved were up to 12 yrs old.

For a male northern (or any Largemouth strain for that matter) to be so large is definitely extraordinary. Actually, those numbers are probably similar to the odds of being struck by lightning. Seriously. For a male to be so big, lots of factors come into play. Genetics--absolutely. Environmental conditions near perfect, plus all that fish needs to eat. Not only all it needs to eat, but some serious nutrition as well. I'd bet those fish have been genetically selected and nurtured at that hatchery for a long, long time. They probably exchange broodfish as young fish grow into their size range criteria, but males so large are rare.

Regarding the Murvaul story, that lake did have something special going on. It was the first (and only) lake I know of it Texas where northern strain bass grew into double-digits. That happened under TPWD famed biologist Charles Inman's watch. That was before Florida bass started their influence in Texas public waters.

Frank,

You make a good point that koi will be more vulnerable than common carp due to standing out.

I can't venture a guess as to how many will grow past predation. Some probably would. Swingle, found goldfish would and so they (colorwise) are just as vulnerable but if they grow slower than koi (which they probably do) then one might expect koi to be more successful at evading predation. Carp and koi can grow large so it doesn't take many large ones to have an impact.

In extensive systems carp can usually not be grown to large standing weights. It really depends on the extent to which they increase turbidity. But they can muddy things up and reduce primary production. Swingle found a niche with them where he grew a combination yielding ~160 lbs/acre Carp (102/acre) and ~660 lbs/acre of Big Mouth Buffalo (918/acre). Under the same treatment of fertilization but with same total number of fish (~1020 fish/acre) only 278 lbs/acre of carp were produced. The carp worked against fertilization by muddying the water and their foraging was limited to the benthos. The combination produced marginally more than Big Mouth Buffalo alone (by about 25 lbs per acre) something that Swingle credited to the Carp's benthic niche which did not compete with the BMB. The key was restricting numbers of Carp so that turbidity did not overly restrict primary production for the BMB. In essence, Swingle was employing polyculture as had been done in Asia for centuries but using an American species for the pelagic planktivore (eg BMB in lieu of BigHead Carp)

IMHO its really hard to beat MOZ TP which is also more energy dense than BG though not as dense as carp. You never have to worry about supporting a heavy standing weight of "too big to eat" ones as long as they die out each winter.

Rod, Koi are just a perfect size/shape to maximize what goes in their mouth fills every dead spot, if you know what I mean.
I did ask the question about BG and the response was that they can't get more weight gain in the same time period with BG as they can with Koi (read pretty Carp). Now, it seems obvious to me this is a hatchery deal, as I don't think we would ever put that type of poundage of pretty carp in our fishing ponds. I'm guessing energy spent on a Koi that doesn't have much fear of the predators is minimal so growth is real good. A month ago, they talked me into purchasing some koi to fatten my smb prior to spawn and they have disappeared much quicker than I expected in 53 deg water, but my smb are FAT. Now I'm using some adult FHM available at all times as well in the tanks and I've found some of the smaller YP I trap at the 3" or so mark disappear quickly as well, but those are fish I can grow and sell later.
I think butt-load and azz-ton are closely related.