there was a study done last year at silvermere where they took i think a hundered bass or something from there and did a stomach content check and they only found one fish with what they thought might be a trout or a salmon all the other fish had other bass or frogs in there stomachs
im gonna try to find this report and post it because i really think its time that people know the realy truth about bass
fyi i am not condoning illegal stocking of bass yes i love to bass fish but i wold never do or condone someone do that
I'm from back east where I grew up watching bass get transfered to areas they never were. It may have been coincidental, but both my father and grandfather also noticed the same trend, where ever bass were introduced into previously purely trout only habitats, the trout populations were eventually over run, and decimated. It's easy to think it's the bass eating everything in sight just by watching how voracious they tend to be, but that's not the issue. It's not that the bass are preying on juvinille fish, it's that they out-reproduce the natural fish species having up to 500,000 eggs per bass vs the trouts 500- a few thousand, and thier offsprings using the same limited resources the trout would use to mature. It's simply that they outproduce the competition for the available resources, so if the resources are abundant they can co-exist fine, it's when resources are limited that you run into issues, which unfortunatly happens the majority of the time.
The main issue I have with them, is that it's too easy for some idiot to transfer a few small fish to thier favorite lake, and it would only take one spawning pair to quickly mess up any closed system.
As someone who grew up around the great lakes, and listened to the stories of my grandfather and father of what fishing used to be like, I sincerly hope that doesn't happen here, and that system should not be used as a model of good co-existance. It has been a model of how man can influence and destroy fisheries by tampering with nature.
There is already a choice for lakes that experience winterkill where rainbow trout are not a good species - it''s called Brook trout. It's the reason they were originally introduced into many of the interior lakes, and is a species that is known to co-exist with our native trout population.
As for studies that show the negative effects of Bass on trout populations here's one small exerpt:
Use of the littoral zone in lakes by fish species varies seasonally (Geiwick and Matthews 1990), and can depend on the presence or absence of
forage (Hall and Werner 1977), life history stage (Werner ec at. 1983a), and trophic position (Werner et al. 1983b). Native fish species within the littoral
zone in most lakes appear to have co-evolved to reduce competition for food and space resources (e.g.. Seehausen and Bouton 1997). Non-native fish
species, because of a lack of co-adaptation, can directly compete for food and space, disrupt native fish species distribution and cause shifts in resource
partitioning (Moyle et at. 1986).
The effect,s of introduced fish have been documented in North America and throughout the world (Courtenay and Kohler 1986, Moyle et at. 1986).
Non-native fish species have been shown to compete for limited resources including food and habitat (e.g., Larson and Moore 1985). be predators of
native species (e.g., Crowder 1980), transmit disease (e.g., Goede 1986), alter habitat (e.g., Forester and Lawrence 1978), and hybridize with native fish
species (Krueger and May 1991).
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Topic: Bass, and flooding (Read 18981 times)