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Closing A Lake Doesn't Improve Bass Numbers In The South
KNIGHT
After doing this a lot of years I have heard most ideas to make fishing or hunting better ... twice.
Some are good and some have enough merit to bounce them around.
Others were shot down years ago for one reason or another, but because everyone forgets why, they surface again. You know the saying: "Same stuff happen just different folks doing it."
One of those ideas popped up last week when someone suggested closing a portion of Lake Tyler during the spring as spawning grounds for bass. With the interest in spring fishing, and especially bed fishing, it is an idea that I haven't heard in years.
Still popular in some northern states, the idea of closing coves, or in some cases the suggestion of closing entire lakes, has been around forever in Texas.
It is an idea that Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has never bought into, and isn't going to start now. The reasons are simple - it doesn't work and it isn't necessary.
Here is the reason it doesn't work.
"What is the difference between catching a bass and taking it out of the lake in October or doing it in April?" said Richard Ott, TPWD fisheries.
"What is the difference between catching a bass and taking it out of the lake in October or doing it in April?" said Richard Ott, TPWD fisheries.
Unless that is the only spawning female in the lake, there are plenty more to take its place.
The key to a good bass production year is high water, habitat and water quality. Largemouth bass are actually a river or swamp fish that have been stocked and adapted to reservoirs. It is their nature to spawn in flood zones, which in a lake is duplicated in high water years.
The closest lakes to East Texas that don't have what TPWD considers healthy bass populations are located in the Waco area, where turbid water is a factor.
Lake Tyler has always been healthy. Creel surveys show Lake Tyler East has always had more fish, but both had good production years last year.
"On both lakes we had excellent reproduction and recruitment in 2007 and this is shown as fish less than eight inches in length. We attribute this to the high water late into the summer and the abundance of terrestrial vegetation that was flooded following two years of drought," Ott said.
Fishermen shouldn't confuse TPWD's supplemental bass stocking program on Lake Tyler in recent years with the need for putting more fish in a lake. That isn't the case. Lakes around the state are restocked with Florida bass simply for genetic purposes. The goal is to keep the percentage of Florida or Florida-strain bass at or above 20 percent in a reservoir. If it dips below that mark it is eligible for restocking with pure Florida bass.
There are no southern states that close waters for bass spawning, never have, and despite a culture of catch-and-keep that goes back to the earliest days, the fish have endured and flourished. Biologists throughout the country are convinced that a closed season achieves nothing except to keep fishermen off the lake at one of the most popular times of the year.
So why do northern states continue to do it? Ott said mostly out of habit and probably a fear of change. It is a throwback, he explained, to old trout management ideas.
Let's face facts. Bass were spawning on Texas' lakes when the limit was 10 fish per day and everyone was keeping their limit. Today the limit is five and everyone releases their fish.
Today's minimum length limit of 14 inches was designed to allow fish to make it through at least one spawning season before being large enough to harvest.
At what size a bass spawns depends on where it is.
"It is hard to pin it down to one size. It is more related to age than one size, and what size it is at a certain age is related to the amount of food available. In some waters it is eight inches. In others the same age may be 14 inches. Typically 1 1/2 to 2 years old is the age that it will spawn for the first time," Ott said.
The biologist explained that the most recent data showed a 14-inch bass on Lake Tyler West might be just over 1 year old, while the same size on Lake Tyler East might be 2.
He added that the best spawners aren't necessarily the largest fish. The state's hatcheries typically use brood bass that are 2 to 5, maybe 6 years old, and then rotate them out.
Not every bass in the wild spawns every year. Some might skip a year, others two years.
"On lakes they may not spawn but every second or third year. It takes so much energy for them to spawn that 20 percent of their body weight," Ott said.
Then there is a time shortly after spawning, that sow is no longer important to the process. At that point, the buck bass takes over as the protector of the young.
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