Hello everybody , I'm in the process of selecting my fish for stocking and I came across this place in Red Hill's GA that are selling Titan Bass ,I assume it's similar to the tiger bass or F1 cross ,don't know for sure. Has anybody stocked these?

Welcome to Pond Boss!

I've never heard of Titan bass, but let's see what others have to say.

Quite impressive setup according to this video https://www.titanbass.com/

Certainly was interesting to watch.

Talk and theory make some sense. There is evidently some investors behind this philosophy. The group is in its infancy. So far as I can tell the group is primarily theory, marketing and investment.

I realize the business is in the beginning stages. Results take time. In the video of the web site, they do not discuss any customer testimony, research results, growth results, stocking results, and studies of the catchability of their bass compared to same the age standard LM bass; both as unfished bass populations. Talk and theory. Numerous side by side test results are needed to convince me. Research should study the tendency of how well both study LMB groups (RH bass and standard bass) deal with the hook smart 'learning' tendency of the study populations over time.

I read through the descriptions of the Red Hills team. Currently their business plan is sales and marketing, sprinkled in with some fishery management which is evidenced in their prime Red Hills Team Member's work experience and history. I did not see any fish genetics PhDs, nor any member that was highly trained in genetic engineering, genetic breeding experiences, gene splicing, or experience with creating GMO fish (genetic modified organism). Those type of people are out there in the work force as evidenced by the detailed advanced work with GMO salmon and other genetic fishery science progects.

Currently there are some great genetic growth abilities of available stocker bass at various fish management companies. RHills video blames poor bass fishing results on the current bass and not the management of the water bodies. Those old pictures of many huge old bass came from under fished, low exploitation waters when modern angler methods were in their infancy. Now many fish populations have been exploited, over fished, and under or poorly managed.

There are many various current bass populations that have great growth potential. This is evidenced by results at Lakework.com, and numerous posts in the LMB Stocking Growth and Management Section of the Forum Archives:
https://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=255372#Post255372

The problem as I see it for growing big bass long term for most all pond owners and private waters is due to lack of attention and implementation of the best management for maintaining abundant appropriate sized foods, proper habitat, proper water quality and proper harvest. All have to be practiced. It is not just a matter of stocking great genetic bass, but it is a matter of doing all the above things at the right time - ALL the time. If ALL the proper management efforts are not implemented even super growth bass will never reach their potential. Every day that is bass did not fill its belly is a day it did not grow. Food has to be in consumed in surplus for the extra nutrients to go towards growth. Super growth potential stocked bass and not harvested properly will result in a pond full of small stunted bass which is a common problem. Read through many our forum posts about problems with largemouth bass as proof positive. Bass problems are almost always management related problems.

It looks like they started business 3 years ago and are promoting stocking only female bass.

Bills post above has some great questions and observations. A few of mine are:
1) If they started 3 years ago, that means that they MIGHT have one or two years of LMB hatching to check growth rates, but no long term angling catchability data
2) If they aren't waiting until the LMB are of breeding age and using a catheter to determine sex during breeding season, then how are they doing it?
3) What lab are they using for their genetic testing? If in house, then who is running the lab?
and the biggest one:
4) What ponds have they stocked the bass in, what size are they now, what size were they when stocked, and WHEN were they stocked, and what are their catchability rates now? How much angling pressure have they seen in the past year? (man hours of fishing per day per surface acre?)

5) Contact for a price? I'll pass.

Agree.

I have zero knowledge of this particular company.

However, I will say that when Marketing People >>>> Science People, then the result is usually a debacle like Theranos!

If I was in the market for some bass, I would not hesitate to contact them and see what they have to say. That doesn't mean you have to buy anything.

Everything was 'new' at some point.

Thanks for the info everybody ,I do agree that they seem to still be in trial phase ,that would explain limited advertisement with only 1 video and no catch results

I am not just interested in catch results but more importantly is what is the tendency for becoming hook smart. No matter how big they grow if they are not REPEAT biters what good is it to have a pond full of big bass that will not bite anything with a hook? Tendency to become hook shy is very important to me. I want big dumb bass not big smart bass.

I would not base my purchase decision on a website (see Bill's suggestions). I looked over the website. The credentials of the science part are certainly sufficient. That does not mean the people are but that the degrees and associations are good. I do not know the people. It looks to me like a couple of guys at the State gov level have convinced a money guy to back them. The money guy probably picked the marketing man.

I am skeptical of some of their statements like this one

"Red Hills’ scientific and breeding processes stand out for one principal reason…they focus on improvements to the genetics of the fish itself, which is something that has been noticeably lacking from the bass industry for decades."

This is a blatant untruth. Many in the industry have been working on this area for many years on many fronts. There are quite a few studies on LMB genetics and what they mean. For one example the State of Texas did a 16-year study on Fla bass genetics. That is only one of many. Multiple states, universities and private Fisheries Scientists have worked in this field for decades.

I know of a few biologist and pond managers that have stocked these Titian bass. From what I`m hearing it`s too earlier to tell if these have superior growth or will it flatten out once the food chain in the ponds and lakes get more in balance.

Scott, they are making a lot of progress in producing genotypical mono-sex populations. This isn't 100% because more one gene can affect differentiation of sex in fish.

With regard to LMB, researchers in Arkansas found evidence that LMB females may be the hetero-gametic sex. This occurs in fish and reptiles. This genotype for this is usually described as YY (male) and YZ (female). When a LMB eggs are fertilized with sterilized (UV irradiated) sperm from white bass then the eggs will develop haploid. But if egg is subjected to high pressure during the time the first division would take place then the division will be arrested and chromosomes duplicated to make diploid zygote of only the parent female. This is not a clone of the parent female ... it contains half the genetics of the parent female (doubled) and every developing embryo will be different than all the rest. If the parent female has good genetics, some of the offspring will be very much like her (here presuming that some have acquired most of the dominate traits). Being hetero-gametic for females. Two populations of genotypes will arise from this. Normal males and Super Females. The super-female is a genotype that cannot yield genotypic males and will yield populations of normal females when bred with normal males. My hunch ... is that this is how they are doing it.



If the LMB are not very numerous and cannot reproduce because of being 100% female, they will grow very well and more commonly outgrow LMB of presumably better genetics. This is because food is usually the limiting factor. So this is an environment/heritage question which has plagued academia for years. It's gray ... and neither white nor black.

Oh and I failed to mention that because the first generation of super-females are originally haploid ... when subjected to the same treatment for the next generation the offspring will be clones of the mother(all super female with same set of duplicate genes). If the original produced superior offspring, then the clones (in principle) should also.

Along the same line of thinking, any of the normal males arising from the first generation may also produce better offspring when mated with super-females than others of the cohort. It is definitely a way to concentrate the genes of an ordinary female that demonstrated exceptional traits producing offspring more reliably similar to the original.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in a pond setting. What will the offspring be like? I'm talking about growth rates, etc.

jpsdad last I checked (a few years) those processes were very expensive, and no private parties were doing so (gov funded studies). They would have to charge a lot (my guess 100s of dollars per fish). Have not followed up on this lately.

I think if there were reproduction ... the growth rates would be similar to just about any other strain that grows locally. I don't think the genetics make very much difference in most private water anyways.

Population structure is key. So here is how I might use a source like this. I might purchase small quantities of fingerlings to grow out to a stockable (and to a size I could sex by catheter). Having a high proportion of female (possibly 100%) would be more efficient. Condensed genetics of known superior examples might also be plus but to get the most out of anything requires plenty of food.

What I would really prefer is to buy ~1 lb < 1 year females certified as female and with some certification as to relative growth of the cohort (eg top quartile, 2nd quartile etc) GROWN SOLELY ON FORAGE for around $20 to $50 a pound. I would just want between 1 to 3 fish per acre/year for the ladder and might start with around 5 to 8/acre for the initial stocking. Something like this could work long term (with ladder) if one could prevent contamination of the pond with males. But even with contamination, if the forage population composed of many mid to smaller sized BG and the LMB population is mostly female, there may be very little or no recruitment LMB allowing for maximized LMB growth.

The most expensive part is the personnel and production and classification of preferred lines. The brood stock are essentially laboratory fish. I haven't tried to estimate cost but I don't think the market is even prepared to purchase 1st quartile fish for $50 a head (though I do think that would be a bargain). To really understand how expensive one would need to understand the cost of production of the brood fish (the super females). After that the cost of production is essentially the same but quality and value of the offspring is substantially improved.

I liked the idea of the claim that they believed they could have Fall spawns and thus have larger fish available for spring stockings, of which those same fish had not lost any growth time between birth in Fall and the following spring.

Who wouldn't love piglet 5-7" or bigger LMB for spring stockings?

I'm doing artificial spawning-as-in early spawning. If I can duplicate our hatchery methods, I hope to have 3" fish by May. But that also translates to 9-12" by late fall. Not the hogs you speak of in spring, but I believe for that to work, a certain number of fish miss the spring spawn and are kept "in the dark" at lower water temps to make that work, with light timing and temp timing being key factors.
I don't believe (I could be wrong) that you can get 2 spawns from this species in the same year.

That's awesome!!!

Info on LMB ploidy

Comparison of Diploid and Triploid Largemouth Bass Growth and Maturation in Puerto Rico
Fisheries Outstanding Technical Paper
SEAFWA Journal Volume 1, March 2014
J. Wesley Neal
Triploid largemouth bass may have potential in sport fish management and in food fish production as a means to eliminate reproduction, which would, in turn, potentially increase somatic growth. To examine this potential, four cohorts of diploid and triploid largemouth bass were produced over a 10 yr period and tagged intramuscularly with coded wire tags. Bass were stocked into Lucchetti Reservoir, Puerto Rico, and recaptured during subsequent sampling events. Growth rates, condition (relative weight, Wr), and reproductive investment (gonadosomatic index, GSI) were compared for diploid and triploid fish. Mean daily growth rate (MDG) did not differ (P &#8805 0.050) between diploids and triploids overall (diploid MDG&#177SE=0.75 &#177 0.02 mm/d; triploid MDG&#177SE=0.74 &#177 0.03), or by age class through age 2. von Bertalanffy growth parameters were similar between ploidy groups (diploid: L&#8734 =384.5 mm, K=1.244, t0= &#45 0.237; triploid: L&#8734 =387.0 mm, K=1.231, t0= &#45 0.31). Unlike triploid largemouth bass, diploid fish exhibited advanced reproductive development following maturation at age 1; thus, mean GSI was greater for diploids versus triploids for both males and females (t &#8805 2.52, P &#8804 0.010). Relative weight was consistently greater for diploid largemouth bass (P<0.008), likely due to greater GSI. The lack of significant growth advantage in tropical environments precludes using triploid largemouth bass to enhance trophy bass potential in Puerto Rico reservoirs. However, triploid largemouth bass may have utility in systems where largemouth bass reproduction is unwanted.

Just to be sure no one is confused. The protocol of using sterilized sperm and meiosis arresting technique on the first division does not induce multi-ploidy. The resulting zygote is diploid which is what occurs naturally. What is unnatural about the super-females is that they don't carry the Y gene. But when mated with normal males all offspring are of the YZ genotype and are normal females.

To be sure, one needn't worry about receiving super-females from such a supplier. They are very expensive to produce and would allow anyone who acquired them to produce all female offspring simply by mating with normal males. That's what they want to do, that is, produce 100% fingerlings of the normal diploid female genotype with normal mating of diploid parents and be the sole source of such fish.

If you have to ask...

Eric:

Could you re-read the article that you posted and correct this sentence so the year figure prints out correctly in the post? Here's what it says now:

"To examine this potential, four cohorts of diploid and triploid largemouth bass were produced over a 10 &#45 yr period and tagged intramuscularly with coded wire tags."

45 year period??


Done - copy error to include pg #

I am considering stocking a pond with the Titan Bass. Has anyone had any luck with them or know anyone who has had good luck or bad luck? I know they are expensive and wanted to ask on here before I spend almost twice if not three times the money on them.

Red Hills Fishery is where Titan Bass will be grown, and that website said to check back for updates. The Red Hills Fishery website was uploaded in 2019, and there's been no updates.

https://www.titanbass.com/

They may turn out to be fantastic, but at this point, I'm a tad leery . No customer statements, no scientific records of growth publicly provided, no price per fish.

Tiger bass could be another option: https://americansportfish.com/fish-stocking-2/tiger-bass/

I would get Lone Star Legacy Bass from Overton Fisheries if I am located anywhere close to them.

You bet. Thank you for the reply. I have a place in East Tx and am considering stocking the Titan bass but don't want to be the first to do it! Could be an expensive project if they don't make it.

Thanks for the reply. We currently are stocking the Tiger bass in a lake or two and have good luck with them. Just looking at something different.