Be Careful What You Wish For

During the recent Bassmaster Classic, we celebrated Dakota Ebare’s 7-pound-plus “meanmouth” (smallmouth bass/Alabama bass hybrid). It’s yet to be 100% confirmed that’s what it was, but it seemed pretty likely. Emil Wagner told me he caught a similar one during practice. Gussy showed a pic of another that he landed on a past trip. 

They were beautiful fish, and I’d love to catch a few, but the local fishery biologists warned us that this may be the start of a bad thing. Illegally-transplanted Alabama bass tend to hybridize easily, especially with smallmouths. The first generation tends to grow large, but after that they shrink. On waters where there aren’t smallmouths, they outcompete the largemouths and relegate the latter to less desirable cover. A few generations later, all you have is an overpopulation of midgets. 

Even worse, they may exterminate native populations. It’s not clear how far north, south or west they’ll end up, which means that species like Suwanee Bass and Shoal Bass may someday be gone if we’re not careful.

And once they’re in, they’re in for good.

A week after the Classic, I was at Buggs Island on the Virginia/North Carolina border. I used to fish there a lot, but once I stopped competing in local tournaments a little over a decade ago, I stopped making the trek. In the interim, Alabama bass got introduced to both Buggs (AKA, Kerr Reservoir) and Lake Gaston downstream. 

To be completely transparent, I was excited to catch my first Virginia “spot.”

My first fish of the morning was a standard-issue largehead, but after that it was all spots.

They weren’t necessarily small. They fought hard. They were fun. But they’re a sign that a lake I once really loved will never be the same again. I recognize that change is inevitable, but this one could have been avoided if the backyard biologists hadn’t been so aggressive. I envision a trip sometime in the future when it’s just chock-full of 10-13” spots, and pitching into a flooded bush doesn’t result in a 4-pound largemouth like it once did. 

I don’t mean to be an alarmist. On my home waters the snakeheads have not become the nuisance, menace and disaster that we once envisioned (the recent sewage spill might turn out to be a different kind of animal). But just because one illegal introduction wasn’t detrimental doesn’t mean it’s good practice. Too many other lakes – like Norman in North Carolina – are shells of their former self – because of such practices.

I will go to Buggs and Gaston in the future. I will enjoy catching spots, particularly if they show up in large numbers. I’ll smile a lot – as in the picture accompanying this story – because I like catching fish. But I’ll also know that the lake will never return to its heyday because someone decided they knew better. I hope that the Tennessee River’s smallmouths and largemouths continue to thrive – alongside the meanmouths if necessary – but I fear that the great weights we say in Knoxville may not be repeated