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AGFC to begin stocking Florida bass into Brushy Creek
ARKADELPHIA - The Fisheries Division of the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission is planning to roll out a new project to introduce Florida-strain largemouth bass into the Brushy Creek arm of DeGray Lake this summer.

The project calls for an intensive stocking of fingerling bass over an eight-year period into the 900-acre lake arm, according to AGFC chief of fisheries Mike Armstrong. "We'll do before and after evaluations to determine genetic introgression of the Florida genes into the resident bass population and resultant changes on bass growth rates and size structure," Armstrong explained. "The goal is to increase the individual size of bass being caught without incorporating more restrictive harvest regulations," he added.

Armstrong said the stocking will begin this June. "We will start collecting fish from DeGray in March to determine the genetic makeup, growth rates and other population metrics of the existing bass population before introducing the new Florida bass," he said.

Armstrong noted that the agency in the past has resisted stocking Florida-strain bass into large, clear, upland reservoirs like DeGray Lake due to the need to stock large numbers every year to effect a lake-wide change in the bass population. "Recent research emerging from Alabama and Texas has demonstrated that heavy localized stocking into an arm of a lake can deliver the desired genetic introgression within a fairly local area of the lake. This project will test that idea over a eight-year period in DeGray," he said.

DeGray was chosen because it is the southern most lake of the large U.S. Army Corps of Engineers reservoirs, it contains the aquatic vegetation habitat preferred by Florida-bass, and it is the smallest of the Corps' hydropower reservoirs. "We deliberately chose not to use Lake Ouachita since we are already trying to establish Tennessee-strain smallmouth bass into that lake, and it has been suffering from a relatively poor forage crop," Armstrong said.

 

 

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