Why Do Bass Get Red Lips and Black Spots? Biologist Explains...

On today's episode we are joined by two fisheries biologists to talk about why bass get black spots on them and why they sometimes have red lips.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

All right, everyone, welcome to the Fair Tangler Podcast, where as always our main course for you will be talking and hopefully teaching you more about bastard. And as always, I'm your host, Bailey Eichbret, and today we have a new segment of the Real Biology for you. I say new, it's actually an older episode that we posted, but one I think is worth uh posting again. Uh things though, unfortunately, Steve, we were supposed to record last week for a new show for you guys. Unfortunately, uh work came up for Steve. He was busy and we were not able to get an episode out, but look out for new ones here coming in the future. So what we're doing is we're uploading one that was from over a year ago, talking about why bass get the black spots on them, the red lips, what that's actually caused from and some of the data and some of the findings from actual biologists in the field on why bass look like this is not just the angler theory of what people think they might be caused from eating crayfish, things like that. This is uh straight from the biologists and what they have found. So we'll have that and much more on today's episode. For you guys that are tuning in here on Sirius Angler. Look forward to a new episode on this Wednesday. In the coming days, we have John Cruz joining us to talk some industry stuff, uh, new baits, and a lot, a lot more from color collection and some interesting takes from a guy in the industry that's highly respected, a business owner, a professional angler, and one that is very good at that. Without further ado, let's get into today's episode, Mr. Steve Barden and Dr. Cynthia Holt.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Yeah, today's a special episode because we have Dr. Cynthia Fox Holt, a true expert in a multitude of things, lives in the DFW area, works for Texas Parks My Life as an inland fisheries biologist. Uh, but also she's had experience in Puerto Rico. We're gonna chat about that because I'm going to Puerto Rico next year. So I'm gonna give travel tips. Okay. Um she's gonna answer one of the questions that we all have about those big black spots that show up on our largemouth and small mouth. And uh we're here together, which is the first time I've had a guest. I'm gonna call it in studio. We'll call it partially in studio.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Um I hear some fighter jets in the background. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

Probably. We're not in the Middle East, we're in West Texas. We're actually at uh we're actually at a kids' camp. So Dr. Holt and I are instructors for a camp called uh Bass Brigade, which is part of the Texas Brigade's youth leadership camps. Uh this is my 12th year. It's probably like your second. Second year. I was gonna give her five. Um but yeah.

SPEAKER_04 2:40

I didn't get wrangled in until last year.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Yeah, so this camp is uh available for students 13 to 17 years old. They come and hang out on a West Texas ranch with Texas Parks and Wildlife Biologists like Dr. Holt. Uh, all of my Texas Pro Lake staff volunteers, Gary Klein comes and teaches some fishing uh technique and sonar and all kinds of cool things with him.

SPEAKER_04 3:04

We also have several high school biology teachers that come out and work with the students, sharing some of their fishing knowledge with them, just general fish nerds.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

Right, a bunch of fish heads. And right now, the students and most of the instructors are down at the stream, the gymnet creek, and they are backpack electrofishing, they're pulling a sein, uh, they're collecting little bugs with kick nets, they're talking about watersheds, doing like a riparian walk. So they're like in the water collecting fish and IDing them and all those things right now. They'll come back up here this afternoon and we're gonna do some fishing skills, some fly fishing skills. Uh they're here all week, and tomorrow they'll do water quality, they'll jump on the electro fishing boat. They're gonna experience what it's like to be a biologist and learn for a week what we do. Uh if anybody's interested in the camp, I'm sure Bailey will put the link in the description below. Um it's gonna be TexasBrigades.org, and I'm sure there's like a click-through to Bass Brigade. I used to be the camp coordinator, but at this point uh that's been passed on. We're on uh Glenn Chancellor now, and one of our West Texas technicians is now the uh camp coordinator. So we're here for the week. I thought this was a cool opportunity to have an in-ho in uh studio guest with Dr. Fox Holt. And her and I have worked on a couple things, so it's gonna be a fun episode, Bailey.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Yeah, yeah, and you that perfectly lined it up for me, Steve. I was just gonna ask, like, if there's somebody listening, whether their kid or themselves wanted to get involved, how to do that. Yeah, we'll definitely we'll definitely link that down below. And uh I guess where you're at in Texas with everything going on is is all okay in your part of Texas with all the chaos and all the thanks for asking that, Bailey.

SPEAKER_01 4:58

You know, um I would say central to South Texas experienced uh some devastating flooding with a tropical storm kind of remnants uh that came across the Pacific, across Mexico, and just hovered over parts of Texas in central Texas. I mean, there's some reports of like 20 inch plus rainfall, you know, in one single day. And uh our camp was not affected. We are just we're about a hundred miles north and just a little bit west. We're not affected, but man, we uh we can't say enough about the impact that that storm had on this central and and south Texas community and in the whole state of Texas. And our hearts go out to it. A lot of our game wardens are there. We usually have a game warden here, uh, probably isn't gonna be able to attend our won't be able to.

SPEAKER_04 5:46

No, they had to, they were deployed to Central Texas to help with search and rescue, and and they're out there, feels like 24-7. We're getting information from them, so it's it's just so devastating, so sad.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

And 20 inches of rainfall, that's about 10 inches less than we get annually in those areas. So that's you know, almost a year's worth of rainfall in one day. It's it's a big deal.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Yeah. Uh videos and photos just that were being seen is just it it's incredible in regards to just one like from the magnitude of how fast and how much came down. It was just insane to watch on the outside. But uh, I guess in a half glass full, it's cool to see all the support that's going down that way. Uh from organizations, brands, things like that that are stepping up, not just throwing funds, but also people that are coming from all over the country to come down and help. And yeah, sad deal. And um we'll try to link some things down below as well if anybody would like to go and try to help and support uh.

SPEAKER_04 6:50

And we did, we were actually reached out to by our um Hupper administration letting us know because obviously the game wardens were sent because they have lots of search and rescue capabilities and training. Most of our fishery staff do not. Uh occasionally we do get deployed to help, but we were told, and so this is kind of a general public thing, that right now they have the people they need. So, you know, don't don't just hop in the car and drive down there because ultimately you would be adding to the chaos rather than helping. So, you know, really do some research and and figure out what the best way to support is because a lot of us, you know, we we we want to jump in, we want to be, you know, we want to be boots on the ground, but sometimes there's too many boots. And so the best thing you can do is send some cases of water or something like that. So so definitely check those links and and you know make sure that that you know you're you're putting your your efforts in the right place because we all want to help.

SPEAKER_00 7:51

Yeah. Well, hopefully we can bring some positive light in regards to uh some fish talking about. So hopefully some more positive conversation, things like that while the uh the boots on the ground are are helping where it's where it's needed. But uh regardless, welcome to the show. Welcome to the the real biology here, and we got some some cool stuff we're gonna talk about that. Uh a lot of people always, I think of even myself included, have been curious of like why bass have these logic spots on them. And we're gonna talk about that and I'm sure a bunch more in this episode. But uh, yeah, with that, Steve, kick us off.

SPEAKER_01 8:24

Well, I think that's a great place to start. Uh that's one of the first projects you and I got to work on together. You were years ahead of me, uh, but you did reach out to me eventually, and uh, you know, I appreciate that from the major league fishing side. We were glad we got help in a small part. But start at the beginning, where did don't answer where the black spots are yet. Let's let's start at the beginning. What is the research behind figuring this out? What is the rules?

SPEAKER_04 8:49

Okay, so we have several different sections of it. Uh the research is primarily being led by the federal agency, USGS, U.S. Geological Survey. Uh, it's based out of their research facility in Leetown, West Virginia. It's the Eastern Ecological Science Center. Uh, I happen to know the PI on the project. He's a good friend of mine. We went to college together, and he was contacted by local anglers in the New York, sort of northeast area of the United States about seeing the black spots on smallmouth bass. And they were seeing them more frequently in the fish they were catching. And then there was a fish kill, don't remember why, but there was a fish kill, and most of the fish in that had blotchy spots on them, so they were like, Is this associated? So that's actually what led to the impetus of the project.

SPEAKER_01 9:49

And that was like 2018-ish or so?

SPEAKER_04 9:52

Uh actually more like 2012. Okay, 2012. Publication came out in 2018. Perfect.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 9:59

So so the research started in 2012.

SPEAKER_00 10:02

So you're go ahead, Ben. Was that uh Oneida Lake by chance? If you if you recall the lake? It was it was a river. Oh yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

Yeah. Okay, so so the USGS team started looking into because of the fish kill. Your role in Texas, you're so far away from New York. How did you get yes, you still? What was your role?

SPEAKER_04 10:25

Yes, so so because he works for a federal agency, the um, oh I can't remember the name of the act. It's uh basically it's a it's a Congress legislation that does not allow federal government to openly ask the public for information. So he reached out to me because I am a state biologist and state biologists are not covered under that act. So we are allowed to reach out to our public and ask for information. So as a biologist in one of the largest metroplexes in the country, I am connected with almost 100,000 anglers through a few Facebook groups, and then um just in person, I see them at outreach events that we work at. And so I contacted them because some of these people are fishing seven days a week, and so I thought that will get us hands-on tons of fish.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

Yeah, what were you all looking for specifically?

SPEAKER_04 11:22

So we were looking for any largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, black bass in general, actually, that might have those irregular blotches on the external part of their body. Um, and when we got really excited was actually when we saw that that some Guadalupe bass had the blotches. And so that really kind of ramped up Texas's desire to understand what was going on. And Texas anglers are phenomenal. We had over 1,000 entries in about eight months.

SPEAKER_01 11:56

So you're just on social media, you're meeting anglers, and you're saying, if you see these, yes, contact Dr. Holt because I want to know.

SPEAKER_04 12:04

Send me the photos, send me the water body where you caught it. Okay, and if you can tell me the length and the weight of the fish, if it looked healthy, that would be great.

SPEAKER_03 12:14

Right.

SPEAKER_04 12:14

And of course, we kept all that information private. There were no no fishing spots were made public to anybody, but it was it was an outrageous number of fish that we saw, which is funny because as biologists, we see f hundreds of fish every year, and we never really noticed it. Right. Never noticed it until we started looking for it.

SPEAKER_03 12:36

Right.

SPEAKER_04 12:36

And then it was everywhere. Everywhere we can go. There are some lakes in our district we can go to, and one out of every four fish is gonna be blotchy. Okay, it's it's insane.

SPEAKER_01 12:46

Well, and this is why I had to have Dr. Fox Holt on the show. Uh, this is what real biology is. This is a group of scientists that say we need help from the public, reach out to anglers. Have you seen blotches on bass? And you get a thousand yeses within eight months.

SPEAKER_04 13:04

Yes. And because the Texas effort was so fabulous and so fruitful, we were actually able to reach out to other states and some Canadian provinces and Mexican provinces that provided anglers provided images to either their state agency or directly to me. And so we ended up having reports, so images from anglers reported from 32 states in about a year and a half.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

Okay, so in my mind, this is what I'm what I'm hearing you say. In New York, we had this little issue, we had a fish kill, we had uh some questions about these blotches. Then you said, Hey Texas Anglers, do you see it? And so you confirmed it in Texas. Now we have like a distribution. Yes, and now you have 32 states, Canada, Mexico. It's it's a North American issue. Yes. So it's not regional, it's not your specific fishery, it's it's all of North America basically. Yes. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 14:03

Where where largemouth bass, where black bass are. Where black bass are. So we we did get a report from the state of Washington, but through the images it looked like blotchy bass, but we were not able to confirm it through the biological testing of the tissue. Yep. So as of right now, Texas is about as far west as it goes confirmed.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Okay. Let's let's pause for a second and make sure the audience understands exactly what we're talking about. Because uh a largemouth or a black bass in general can have natural coloration patterns on their bodies that we would call blotches.

SPEAKER_03 14:42

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 14:43

So in science it's kind of this weird thing. Like uh below the lateral line on a largemouth, you have blotches, which are pigmentations that come from the scales that are slightly darker. Um they can be present or they cannot be present, depending on watercolor, clarity, time of year, temperature, so many variables, they will change color even throughout the day. You catch a bass, you put it in your live well, it was white when you caught it, it comes out really green and spotted or blotchy uh an hour later. What we're talking about though is like the big black tattoo bass.

SPEAKER_04 15:18

Ink-like blotches. That's that's the terminology that we tried to use to separate it from the standard blotch of a bass typical coloration, is it looks like an ink-like spot on the scales of the fish or on the mouth or the fins. It actually occurs most commonly on the fins and the lips.

SPEAKER_03 15:37

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_04 15:37

Uh so it looks like they're wearing lipstick.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

So how many how many entries did you get that you were like, I don't see anything? This is just normal skin.

SPEAKER_04 15:45

Several, several. Because for especially for largemouth bats, they actually have a dark spot on the posterior of their operculum, and I got so many of those.

SPEAKER_01 15:57

That means gill, the gill covering.

SPEAKER_04 16:00

I'm sorry. My bad, my bad.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

Please, please. We this is this is perfect because I like to have, and Steve is great at dummy. This is why I'm here. I'm I'm the dummy user always, so I need to have it in simpleton terms, but it's good to have what they're actually called. Okay, that's how we educate.

SPEAKER_04 16:20

Okay, but yes, so so many anglers send in send in photos, and they're like, hey, is you know, is this blotchy? And and we're like, no, that's actually just a natural coloration, but you know, thank you for submission, keep looking. And almost, you know, they were oh, okay, cool. You know, so a lot of people were able to learn a lot. They also, you know, misidentified blotchy for a couple of other, you know, illnesses that can occur on fish. Black spot is one of them, but it's a very different illness that I don't know absolutely nothing about, so please don't ask me. But uh, but yeah, and and one other distinctive characteristic of the blotchy bass ink-like spots is that if you if you touch it, it will slough off. So, like if you rub it with your finger, or we were actually using bugle swabs, that was one positive of COVID-19, unfortunately. But if if you want to think silver lining, it made non-lethal data collection on fish very easy because the same swabs they use to test for COVID are the swabs that we used to collect blotchy bass syndrome skin cells from fish, and they they will when you wipe it with the swab, the skin cells come off, so the black spot goes away.

SPEAKER_01 17:41

Interesting.

SPEAKER_04 17:42

It scared me the first time that I did it because I was like, Oh, what did I do? And so I contacted the the biologist Clay at USGS, and he says, Oh, yeah, that's that's how you know you got the sample right, is it it came off. That's okay.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

So phase one was this, let's get all the pictures, let's find out distribution. Phase two is what you're talking about now, where you actually physically collected specimens and then you wipe the buccal swab uh to get skin cells.

SPEAKER_04 18:11

Yes, from both wild-caught and captive populations. Bass Pro Shops was actually Bass Pro Shops Cabellas were very instrumental in allowing USGS to get some controlled samples because most of those fish are wild-caught fish that then go into the tanks. And so when they would see the blotches on them, they will actually carry blotches sort of year-round, whereas your wild populations, the blotches will come and go based on a few different environmental factors that we're not exactly sure how they interact with each other, but you can see based on reporting from the anglers, the highest percentage of reports came from November to April. April was actually the peak of reporting, so right during bass spawning season. So um might have a reproductive hormone component to it. We haven't been able to determine that yet. But with the captive fish in bass pro tanks and gabela's tanks, those fish would keep the watches kind of year-round, so they were able to track more of you know how it operated on the fish, even though it was a captive population. So that's what allowed us to really, because I don't know how much you know about viruses, I know very little, but what I've learned is that you have to build the virus genome to be able to describe it. And so they were able to do that using the Bass Pro and Cabela's fish. So then when we went out and collected wild specimens and sent them those swabs, they could then compare it to those to determine if it was the same virus or a different virus.

SPEAKER_01 20:05

So she's letting the cat out of the bag here. That's okay. Sorry. That's okay. This is how it works. This is we get so excited about it, we just want to talk the science.

SPEAKER_03 20:13

Just goes, goes, goes.

SPEAKER_01 20:14

So you've got the black spots, you start the buccal swab, you got a control population. So then the next step was the map the genome. Yep. Okay, so what did we figure out? What is causing or what do all the black spot fish have?

SPEAKER_04 20:29

Well, I can't say it's all the black fish. There, there is no there is no definitive always. Um, but most anglers, and they're probably thinking this right now as they're listening to your podcast, saying, Well, it's just because of their diet, or it's just UV, which, even as fishery scientists, prior to this study, that's what I was telling people when they would send photos. Yeah, it's probably just their diet, it's probably UV. They're I'm sure they're fine, you know, no worries, release them, nothing. But turns out that bass, just like humans, just like lots of other animals, carry bacteria and viruses on the outside of their bodies.

SPEAKER_03 21:06

Right.

SPEAKER_04 21:07

But it normally doesn't make them sick. Okay. However, black basses have a type of virus that's called anodomavirus. It's a specific family of viruses. Okay. I can't tell you much more about it, other than it is typically species-specific. So there's a specific virus for one species of fish, a different species of fish. We do know that it's not transmissible to humans. Okay. Big point, not transmissible to humans or pets. Okay. And uh they carry the virus, and then when they get stressed, so spawning, temperature, oxygen, water quality, something like that, that starts the immune response. And the blotch, the ink like spot that forms is actually the immune response to the stressor.

SPEAKER_03 21:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 21:56

So it's basically if you have a bug bite, and you get the Red inflammation and the itching, that's essentially what the ink-like spot is on fish. It is that reaction to the stressor.

SPEAKER_01 22:07

Case closed.

SPEAKER_04 22:09

That's what it is.

SPEAKER_01 22:09

It's an immune response to a stressor.

SPEAKER_04 22:13

Yep. And it could be any stressor. There, we haven't been able to determine a specific stressor.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

So in this, let me summarize so that I remember it. So we have the bass pro shot fish that are in a controlled environment. You map the genome of the skin cells that are coming off the blotch. And then you're able to collect wild-caught fish. How many states, like how many people participate in this part?

SPEAKER_04 22:41

Probably 20 states provided samples.

SPEAKER_01 22:43

Okay, so 20 states from across the country provide samples, and those blotch samples were matched genomically. So it's the same virus, it's not like 150 different ones. It is a black bass specific smallmouth and largemouth in Guadalupe's.

SPEAKER_04 23:00

We have so the only ones we've confirmed individual viruses are largemouth, which there might actually be a difference with the debate about Florida bass versus northern bass.

SPEAKER_03 23:13

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 23:14

There might be a specific genomic virus between those two species as well as a genetically separate virus for smallmouth and a genetically separate virus for shoal bass. Those are the only ones they have been able to confirm so far.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

So let me think about this now. Smallmouth and largemouth are different species. We all know that. We all agree to that. Bailey, you're good with that? Okay. So if I have a smallmouth with a black blotch, that's an immune response to a virus that's on the smallmouth, and it say it again, a domain.

SPEAKER_04 23:47

Adoma virus.

SPEAKER_01 23:48

Adoma virus on a smallmouth. But that same edoma virus in the water comes into contact with largemouth however it gets there, it's not going to give that same immune response. No sense. Because that's a different species. It's a different virus. Yes. So you've mapped three of them so far. Yes. Largemouth, which would be northern largemouth, or they've mapped both.

SPEAKER_04 24:10

Oh. And um there is a slight difference between the northern and the Florida, because we now know that genetically the Northern and the Florida bass are different. And so if you have the this so very scientific, we all know DNA is made up of the four bases. You can have one base change that will lead to a phenotypic change, which is largemouth to smallmouth. Or you can have a base change that doesn't lead to phenotypic change, but it leads to a genetic change. So Florida Northern, the edomavirus is doing that.

SPEAKER_03 24:50

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 24:50

So it is, they're all edomaviruses, but they are species very species specific.

SPEAKER_01 24:56

Alright, so the the blackbotch is an immune response to an edomavirus that is linked to the species. I'm gonna ask you a question I don't expect an answer for. Okay. What about hybrids?

SPEAKER_04 25:10

So they actually were able to map the genome. Okay. And it is a it is a mix of the two.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

Oh my goodness. I don't I don't even know where to go from here.

SPEAKER_04 25:22

So viruses, viruses are crazy.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

Viruses are crazy.

SPEAKER_04 25:25

But they have one thing that that I really want people to know is the viruses have essentially been around as long as the bass have. This is this is not something new. This is not humans have not, it's not a pollution, humans have not caused it.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 25:40

This is this is a completely natural thing.

SPEAKER_01 25:43

And at this point also, it's not impactful.

SPEAKER_04 25:47

It's not we are not sure.

SPEAKER_01 25:49

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 25:49

So that's so that's the next, that's the next step. Um we well, we actually have sort of two next steps because um unfortunately the the angler submitting photos took off so much farther and so much faster than we expected that it wasn't until about halfway through the project with me and with the Angler Atlas that, which I'm kind of jumping ahead there, but with both projects, it happened so quickly that we didn't think through we had distribution, but we didn't really, we weren't able to determine prevalence. So it is completely possible that every fish that that has this stress response that's having those black blotches is going to be perfectly healthy and fine and live a super long life and everything's great. It might also be possible that they're all dying and ending up at the bottom of the lake, and we don't know it because when they get sick, as most of us know, they don't actively hunt, so they don't actively bite lures, and so anglers are not as prone to catching them. So we're not really sure if it is negatively impacting populations, but because we know that it is becoming more prevalent, and it is, of course, a virus that is related to stressors, and stressors are becoming more and more frequent in everyday life. This is why we need to continue to study this to see how it will affect populations, especially when you consider the fact that it is species specific. And the Guadalupe bass is a very small population in a very specific area of the state, right? We did have some of those fish submitted with images that looked like they had blotchy bass. So this is why as a biologist in Texas and you know, as part of TPWD, we do want to see more fish what's going on.

SPEAKER_01 27:47

Okay. So um I want to think about the bass pro-shop fish for a second. Okay. Because the bass pro shop fish are in a controlled environment and we can kind of watch them over time, but they'll have this stress response, this blotch, and then they'll continue to live. Yep. So at least in a captive environment, we feel like they're okay.

SPEAKER_03 28:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 28:09

Okay. Yes. Man, Bailey, how's that for a a nerd beginning to an episode?

SPEAKER_00 28:15

That's that's perfect right there. I mean, there's been so many different things that I've heard on it where it's like, oh, it's just a sign of a healthy fish tree. Oh, it's a sign that that fish you hear all the time. They have the black spots because they're around a bunch of other fish. That's how they get them. And then it's no, this is the actual reason.

SPEAKER_04 28:32

My favorite one was, oh, it's because they're eating crayfish.

SPEAKER_01 28:36

Yep.

SPEAKER_04 28:36

That was that was the most common response that I got was it was because they were eating crayfish.

SPEAKER_01 28:41

And now that you've said that in the comments, somebody's gonna say, What about the red lips? So do you want to tackle nope? Nope. Yeah, I always uh I because a lot of times I see the black spots as we're coming out of winter into that spawn.

SPEAKER_02 28:58

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 28:59

And that's the same time that we do see bass with red lips. And uh I've I've also heard the same thing about the red lips. Like it's because they're eating crayfish, and I always say, well, in my mind, once again, uh this may or may not be true. In my mind, the causation of that would be temperature. They need blood to go to certain parts of the body, they're starting to forage at a greater rate because they're getting ready to spawn. Um, we see similar things with stress response in a live well. Like if you leave a fish in a live well, you'll have red fins, red lips, because that's blood being pushed to certain areas of the body.

SPEAKER_04 29:34

Well, and and they're they're bumping into the walls of your live well, and they are actively feeding. They typically feed on sunfish, which are spiny. They typically come from behind, so they're probably catching those spines on the lips, and so that's leading to that inflammation. Maybe they're using, you know, they're they're bumping other fish to protect their nest and their eggs. So that that's always what I thought the red lips were. But I also used to think that blotchy bass was related to diet or sun, so who knows?

SPEAKER_01 30:04

And I think this is the cool part about science is um you have two scientists that live and breathe this every day that are saying, I have an opinion, I have a thought on what I think this could be, but it's not based on thousands of hours of observing and trying to answer this question, it's just an environmental observation. This is what those fish should be doing right now, so this is what we think it is. And at some point, somebody, maybe because of a fish kill or because of they're looking into live whale mortality or whatever, somebody will research it. Yep. Um, and that's you know, that's what's cool about this blotchy thing. You mentioned Angler Atlas, and I I want to go down that route a little bit more. I think, Bailey, do you have any further questions on the virus?

SPEAKER_00 30:49

No, I think we pretty much answered the.

SPEAKER_04 30:51

Well, I do I do have one other one other step. So so I mentioned the the one direction of the of the prevalence. Um and the reason we weren't able to get at that is because anglers were only reporting watchy fish, they weren't reporting all of the fish, right? And that's what leads into the angler atlas perfect thing. But one other side to that is we are not sure how the virus spreads.

unknown 31:18

Fair.

SPEAKER_04 31:19

So, because oddly enough, within Texas Parks and Wildlife, we don't see blotchy bass virus in any of our hatchery fish, none of them, and we raise the Sherlunkers. We looked through the history of the Sherlunker photo database, and there was not a single blotchy bass in all of those entries, not one. I'm shocked by this. I we were too. So we don't so obviously, even though the idea is that they do carry it, there is a point where they can be stressed and not show the immune response, clearly, but we don't know why, we don't know how it spreads, and so one of the subjects that we are going to try to tackle in future years, if we can get the grant funding to do it, is to do a laboratory study with control and blotchy fish with different types of contact, just water, fish to fish, human hand to fish, because one really unique fish that that was seen on an eastern coastal state was it was a it was a smallmouth bass, and when they electrophished it and they pulled it up and they looked at it, there was actually a thumbprint of a blotch in the mouth. So that seems like it came from the angler to the fish. So that's that's one direction that the research is heading. But then thanks to Angler Atlas, so that's so that's my catch angler Atlas, it is an app that is free to download and it allows you to submit your catches. They use it to collect a very broad scale study information, and they were willing to work with USGS on this. They developed sort of an angling tournament. Um, and anglers could sign up for free, and when they would go fishing, they would open the app, start their fishing trip, and then every fish they caught, they would submit that fish. They would put an image of that fish on their app, and then that gave us a better picture of prevalence. However, that was much more effective in the northeastern states than it was in the southern states, because the southern states don't have cell phone servers. No, they don't want to they don't want to show their honey holes, they didn't trust it. But no, I'm no, I'm just kidding. No, uh, a lot of times it was one of those things where they would forget.

SPEAKER_03 34:00

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_04 34:01

They would get out, they would be fishing, and then 10 fish in, they catch a blotchy fish. Oh, yeah, I was supposed to be submitting this, and then they start. Well, then they may not catch another fish. So it looks like 100% of the fish they caught were blotchy when when really they weren't.

SPEAKER_03 34:18

Gotcha.

SPEAKER_04 34:18

So, but the Anglers Atlas app was a phenomenal part of this city. No, so so that tournament was for one full year. We started it in March of I think it was March of 2022, okay, and then continued it through March of 2023 so that we made sure to get that full spawning season, and it was a perfect thing with the fish. We saw the the rise in the numbers in the spring, went down in the summer, tanked in August. You saw very few fish with it in August, except up in the northern northern states, okay, and then started to come back up, and the tournament ended. And so many organizations, Fast Pro Shops, Cabela's, you know, they offered gift cards, Aftco, yes, offered gift cards and prizes for people that participated, and I it was I was blown away by the number of entries that we got.

SPEAKER_01 35:21

See, and that's um, in my opinion, that's the power of anglers. Yes. As biologists, you said it yourself. Like you go out and you electrophish. Let's say you electrofish, um, you're in DFW, so Louisville Lake, right? Yes. You electrofish Louisville, you got 20 stations you're gonna do, you're five minutes per station. I don't know exactly how you'll do it.

SPEAKER_04 35:43

That's that's exactly we have 24 stations, but they're they're all five minutes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:47

So in that, you do that at night. You may see one. Maybe. And it's nighttime.

SPEAKER_04 35:54

So you may not even and it barely has a blotch. It'll be like a pinhead blotch.

SPEAKER_01 36:00

But Angler Atlas running for a year, you you know, let's say they just have a thousand English, but they have several thousand English, they're gonna get a lot of examples, even from Louisville, if those English participate, where you would miss them. And that's the power of Anglers. Like is as scientists, the more partnerships we create like that, the better our data collection is. And I think, you know, you've answered a great question about flashy bass, but I think the moral is when we can partner together, we we speed our science up a lot.

SPEAKER_04 36:32

Absolutely. And the perfect example of that is Belton Lake. So most Texans know Belton Lake is where you go if you want to catch smallmouth.

SPEAKER_03 36:40

Right.

SPEAKER_04 36:40

Texoma and Lake Fork, yes, are fabulous. But Belton is as a transplant, Belton is the smallmouth bass lake in Texas. Our Waco team surveyed that reservoir. They did 24 or five-minute stations. They caught tons of smallmouth bass. None of them were blotchy, but yet we had two or three hundred anglers that submitted photos of blotchy smallmouth bass from Lake Belton.

SPEAKER_01 37:06

Okay, I got another question. You just sparked it, and you may not be able to answer this, and that's completely okay.

unknown 37:11

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

Smallmouth bass aren't from Texas. Correct. Blotchy bass would follow species line based on the edoma viruses that are species specific. How did that virus, that blotch that's specific to smallmouth, get to Belton Lake?

SPEAKER_04 37:29

It came with a fish. Because those fish would have came would have been from an area where smallmouth bass are native. Right. So they would have been carrying the virus on them.

SPEAKER_01 37:40

From a hatchery.

SPEAKER_04 37:41

From a hatchery.

SPEAKER_01 37:42

But our hatchery.

SPEAKER_04 37:43

Or possibly from a wild population.

SPEAKER_01 37:46

But our hatchery doesn't have them.

SPEAKER_04 37:47

No.

SPEAKER_01 37:48

So Texas raises like four and a half, five million Florida bass a year, roughly. And the broodstock, we don't see blotches on them. Correct. But that doesn't mean that they don't have the virus. Correct. What that means is that they don't have a stress response to show you a blotch.

SPEAKER_04 38:05

They don't have a strong enough stress response to show you a blotch.

SPEAKER_01 38:09

Alright, so from the Angler Atlas data, can you tell me like what is the smallest fish that we saw with a blotch?

SPEAKER_04 38:16

The smallest fish we saw was about 12 inches.

SPEAKER_01 38:20

About 12 inches. So have you ever seen one?

SPEAKER_04 38:23

Like so I did see one in one of my ponds in the city of Dallas that was about six inches, and there is no way you would have convinced me that this fish was not blotchy. The blotches were there. We wiped it with the buccal swab, the blotch came off. We sent that swab to USGS, and it was negative for a domain.

SPEAKER_03 38:46

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 38:46

So it seems like it only presents in adult fish.

SPEAKER_03 38:51

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 38:53

So that blotch, or what I saw as a blotch, may have been a stress response to the electrofishing.

SPEAKER_01 38:59

Which or the handling. Yes. Absolutely case.

SPEAKER_04 39:02

We see that happen quite frequently. So it was about 12 inches was the smallest fish that we saw it on. That said, there is some evidence that bluegill and a few sucker species, and possibly even channel catfish, have a similar edomavirus that causes the same immune response, the black blotches.

SPEAKER_01 39:25

And I've seen it on green sunfish. Yep. So what about the largest fish?

SPEAKER_04 39:32

Uh I want to say maybe around four to five pounds.

SPEAKER_01 39:37

Okay. Because you said none of the share lunkers. None of the share lunkers. Sherlunker in Texas, of course, it's during a spawning window, January to the end of March. But that would be a 13-pounder, bigger fish that's going to go to the hatchery. We haven't seen one of those, but you're saying like four to five pounds. There's some gray area there. That's okay. That's okay.

SPEAKER_04 39:54

And then actually, uh, I did personally see an image of a smallmouth bass that was about, I think, I think he told me it was six pounds. Wow. And uh it had a blotch.

SPEAKER_01 40:07

Very distinct. The angler wasn't a guy named Andy, right?

SPEAKER_04 40:10

No.

SPEAKER_01 40:10

Okay, because he's a liar. Bailey, what's the have you caught these with the black blotches before?

SPEAKER_00 40:19

Yeah, uh largemouth and smallmouth. Uh more up here in New York, I've caught more smallmouth that have them. Uh like literally like spotted cow looking ones. We call them Dalmatians when we catch them. Uh but yeah, I mean, we don't see a lot, but we definitely see them in various of our fisheries. Any of the any big fish or just normal uh the one that had like uh 30 uh spots on it. I even have a whole photo, I have a photo of it and everything. It was about a five and a half pound smallmouth.

SPEAKER_01 40:49

Amazing. Yep. Yeah, that is cool. That's a big one. That's a big one to have spot.

SPEAKER_04 40:54

New York is actually where it was first first um observed by an angler. It was in the Hudson River in New York.

SPEAKER_01 41:01

And Bailey is in New York, and um he he constantly is looking for what can an angler group do to participate. Um so I'm sure we could have some ideas for him on different things they could do if if we want to continue this blotchy bass.

SPEAKER_04 41:15

Absolutely. I'm still getting I'm still getting images from anglers on the regular, not just from Texas, but from other states. And I have a nice file, I put everything in, collecting as much data as I can so that it stays within the the the public eye, really. So, you know, wanna wanna keep keep keep it in the public eye, keep people thinking about it so that you know if if there's a big enough there's a big enough push, then maybe we will be able to get the funding to do the additional research that is needed.

SPEAKER_01 41:49

Yeah, I I kind of want to talk about that funding part. Um you may not know, on a single sample, what is it costing to run just one single buccal swab to say this is a virus, this is not a virus?

SPEAKER_04 42:03

About 20 bucks.

SPEAKER_01 42:04

About twenty dollars per sample. And how many samples do we need? How many where do we need to take this?

SPEAKER_04 42:12

Well, at this point, um, we really uh we need samples from black bass that are not Florida, Northern, Smallmouth, and Shoal. We need samples from Guadalupe, from spotted, from Chattahoochee, Alabama. Okay. We need it from those fish because those are the fish that we don't have the genome mapped yet. So that is more difficult. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 42:39

Yeah, that is more difficult. Especially because some of those have to have genetic verification on top. So then you're looking at $20 to run your vehicle, plus you're looking at like $14 to run your genetics, plus purchasing the equipment, getting it to the anglers because it has to be shipped out.

SPEAKER_04 42:56

There is a specific, you know, process that you have to go through. The good news, again, silver lining to COVID, they were able to develop an R an mRNA solution. So just essentially a solution that will protect the genetic material that can stay at room temperature. So it doesn't have to be frozen, it doesn't even have to be refrigerated, and it'll last for about six months.

SPEAKER_01 43:23

So at that at the collection part of your study, y'all were actually using English to collect the samples as well. Yes. Oh, I missed that. Okay, so tell me a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_04 43:34

So we had a few anglers in Texas and a few other states that said, you know, hey, I have some in a private pond or at this community pond where I like to go fishing. I've seen it. What can I do? And we asked them if they would be willing to accept some swabs and then send them back. We sent them prepaid envelopes, swabs, everything was labeled for them. They just had to write down the information about the fish. Where they caught it and their names so that we knew, you know, who the samples were coming from, and then they would send those in. So that was actually how we were able to get a few samples from some water bodies, you know, private water bodies, because as far as mom life, we are not allowed to work on private water bodies. And some of those pond owners were willing to provide full history of stocking the hatchery where they received their fish, all you know, things like that. Um, and then it it really allowed us to kind of narrow in on, you know, it's not just public waters, it's not just water bodies that parks and wildlife have stopped because that was a question. Is it something that's coming out of the hatcheries because we're overproducing, we're crowding something to that effect? We were able to prove no, it's not. It is a completely naturally occurring virus.

SPEAKER_03 44:48

Amazing.

SPEAKER_04 44:49

And so that's all over North America. It's all over East, East, North America.

SPEAKER_01 44:56

It's all over North America.

SPEAKER_04 44:57

Texas East. Texas north to Canada and East.

SPEAKER_01 45:02

Gotcha. Um, let's switch gears a little bit. You know, you this project is one of the reasons you and I got so close and got to know each other, but you do a lot in the DFW area that is also kind of part of my passion project with small empoundments. Um so I'd like to talk about that for a little bit because it's we think of Texas and we think of Fork. Now people think of Ivy, we think of Rayburn, we think of Toledo Bend. And you have some major reservoirs as well. I do. Um, I mean Lewisville was on display this year.

SPEAKER_02 45:36

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 45:37

But there's another part of being an inland fisheries biologist, which is not just reservoir management, yeah. And it's small empowerment, community management. Tell me a little bit about that tract. Did you number one, did you see yourself going into that?

SPEAKER_04 45:51

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 45:52

Okay, so this has been part of the vision.

SPEAKER_04 45:54

Yes. When when I decided to become a freshwater fisheries biologist, uh, which I did not start there. I started with sharks like most kids.

SPEAKER_03 46:02

Right.

SPEAKER_04 46:02

You know, but um when I decided to become a freshwater fisheries biologist, and I myself learned how to fish, uh, which I did not learn until later in life. Uh I was I was well into my third degree before I started enjoying fishing as an activity. Um, but I realized early on when I was in college and I would work with young children and to see them catch that first fish, that you know, they actually cast the line out, set the hook, reel it in. That was one of the most amazing experiences for me. And to get to pass that on to children that don't know that that's an option, that they don't know that careers like this exist to see that light bulb go off or to see that bright smile is the epitome of a good day for me. And so, you know, reservoirs are awesome, but they can oftentimes be difficult for a lot of anglers to access because they don't always have shoreline access, and and not everyone has access to a boat or a fishing pier that goes way out, kind of like what you see at the coast. So I wanted to focus and I started to focus on those smaller impoundments so that I could have a bigger impact with more people. And honestly, the biggest thing that I have found as I've worked in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex is that usually they don't need fish, they need habitat. Yep. That's that's where it goes because most inner city ponds, community ponds, they're not built with creating a quality fishery in mind. They want a pretty water feature, something that's great to look at, which they are. I don't care if they are a bulkheaded fishbowl or a vegetated, you know, oasis. They are all pretty to look at. Water is just pretty in general. But when people see water, they want to fish. And so, you know, and unfortunately, I don't think there's a state agency in North America, and I may be wrong, but I don't think there is a state agency that can produce enough fish to stock every water body every year all the time.

SPEAKER_03 48:16

Correct.

SPEAKER_04 48:16

And so my job as an urban fisheries biologist is to figure out how to provide quality fisheries with the resources that we have. And so nine times out of ten, it's a habitat issue because you don't have the right area for fish to spawn and reproduce, so you don't have a bunch of new babies coming into the population, or you don't have an area for those babies to hide from the predators. And then you also maybe be missing something that is building the base of the food chain, like invertebrates, phytoplankton, paraphyte, and things like that. And so I even though I'm a fisheries biologist, I'm very much becoming a fish habitat biologist.

SPEAKER_03 49:02

Yes, I love it.

SPEAKER_04 49:03

And so I I just recently um have completed two projects, major projects with cities, and then I've got two more on the books that are coming up where we're not even talking fish yet. We are just talking pond construction and possible habitat opportunities. So gravel for spawning beds. So because bass and sunfish are nest builders, the males are going to go in, they're gonna build their nests, females are gonna lay the eggs, and then they're gonna the males are gonna protect it so that the babies survive. Well, next to those gravel beds, we typically like to put vegetation because then when the babies are born and excuse me, when they hatch and they start swimming on their own, they'll head straight to that vegetation that will provide them with food and protection from predators. And so I will go to a pond, and the first thing I do is I look at the entire shoreline, and then if I can, I put my boat in and I'll look at the bottom, I'll see what the depth of symmetry is, so see what the contours look like, figure out where we can put these habitats where it will protect the fish, but also provide a quality fishery for anglers because we look at try to look at the pond as a whole. So we all know that bass and sunfish and catfish love structure. So rock pilings, trees, the things like moss back fish attractors, PVC, fish cubes, crappie condos with bamboo, anything, which those don't typically work in ponds because they're too tall, but things like that. So when I look at a pond, I work with the city to show them okay, you have a great pond. Now let's make it a great fishery. Let's put some gravel here, let's plant some vegetation here. I work really closely with several local aquatic plant producers, right? And they help me determine what plants will be best for that pond based on water substrate, our goals, control, because of course everybody worries about oh, are the plants going to get out of control, and then we're not gonna be able to fish. Well, they are able to help me select plants that either won't get out of control or are very easily controlled without harming what's in the pond. And so I'm writing a lot about aquatic plants here lately.

SPEAKER_01 51:26

I love this. You said so much there that I need to unpack. Um, first, you started out like everybody. I want to work on sharks. Um, so you wanted to go the marine biology path. I did. And you learned that bass are way more aggressive, so I would rather work on bass, is what you decided. Yep. No, um, did that you grew up in kind of the the middle.

SPEAKER_04 51:50

I grew up in middle Tennessee.

SPEAKER_01 51:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 51:52

No ocean, no ocean anywhere.

SPEAKER_01 51:54

So you just saw this on TV?

SPEAKER_04 51:56

Yes. Okay. Yes. And every every TV show and every book I read, the only people who were researching sharks were people with PhDs. Okay. So at 11 years old, I told my mom, I'm gonna get a PhD in marine biology.

SPEAKER_01 52:11

Perfect. And you stuck to it all the way up until you met Dr.

SPEAKER_04 52:16

Quentin Fontenneau and Dr. Elise Ferrara at Nickel State University in Thibodeau, Louisiana.

SPEAKER_01 52:21

And what what was the tipping point there?

SPEAKER_04 52:23

What so I went, so I visited um because I was struggling to find a graduate program that would suit me, that I could be able to study sharks, because at the time a lot of people were studying the dead zone in the Gulf, and so most research was going to that. And I went um Fisheries World Small. So my professor in undergrad had just taken on a PhD student that had finished his master's with Dr. Elise Ferrara. So he put me in contact with them, they invited me down to see the university, and they were awesome. They basically told me, they said, you know, look, we have a satellite campus that is on the coast that you can go to, but you're gonna have, you know, very little support staff. All of your professors are gonna be here. There's very little funding, you're gonna have to get your own grants, you know, you are gonna be essentially on your own. Right. Or you can stay here, switch to freshwater, which management is management, and we have funding, we have lab space, you know, you can pick your project and go for that. And so I actually I was just telling the story to someone earlier today. I had only been prior to that, I had only been fishing three times in my life, and which is weird considering I lived next to I've lived 20 minutes west of Del Hollow Lake where the world record smallmouth bass was caught. But I had never seen a largemouth bass that didn't have the dark coloring. I'd never seen one. So Quentin takes me out, and we set a gill net, and I'm pulling it in, and I see this fish that has a white belly and a lime green body.

SPEAKER_03 54:08

Right.

SPEAKER_04 54:08

It's got a big mouth, the underside of it is very white, flexible, flimsy, you know, and I'm staring at it for what felt like forever. And Quentin said, Cynthia, what's wrong? And I said, Quentin, what is this? He says, That's a largemouth bass.

unknown 54:24

Right.

SPEAKER_04 54:25

I was like, No, it's not. That was my introduction to largemouth bass sampling.

unknown 54:31

Amazing.

SPEAKER_04 54:32

And so I was actually doing a study on yellow bass, so temperate basses. That was that was what I was working on. But I was setting gill nets, so you know, they are they are non-specific, they catch everything. And so that was the first time that I realized that fish could change color to adapt to their environment. And I just became fascinated. And after that, I was all about the freshwater fish, all about the freshwater fish. And I loved management and I wanted to introduce the public to it, so I just continued with largemouth bass because it bass is king, right? You know, like that's that's what people want to fish for.

SPEAKER_01 55:10

So we agree with that. So so from I I still have so many questions. These three fishing trips you did as a as a child, I presume. Yes. Who took you? Where did you go? How old were you? Like roughly.

SPEAKER_04 55:25

Okay, so I actually can tell you exactly for all three.

SPEAKER_01 55:29

Perfect.

SPEAKER_04 55:30

So my first fishing trip was devastating.

SPEAKER_03 55:33

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 55:34

Because so where I grew up, there was a gentleman who had a farm pond, and he would allow the community kids, he would prov he would provide us cane poles, he had a worm box that he raised the earthworms in, and we could come and we could get them. He had little measuring boards, so he used us to cull his fish. Oh, wow. And so he would let us come up and fish and anything for the sunfish of a certain size and bass of a certain size, he had it marked. Certain size you can take home, other size you put back in. Okay. So my brother and I had gone up and we had fished and we took home a mess of sunfish. How old were we? I was four. My brother was ten. And we get home. My mom, who had fished and hunted as a teenager, cleans the fish and she's cooking them because I mean they were sunfish, but we were proud, so she was cooking them.

SPEAKER_03 56:20

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 56:21

She started to have an anaphylactic reaction to the fish.

SPEAKER_03 56:25

Oh no.

SPEAKER_04 56:26

So we ended up in the emergency room. The very first time I ever went fishing, I sent my mother to the emergency room.

SPEAKER_01 56:31

Okay. And do you know why this happened?

SPEAKER_04 56:35

She just developed the allergy later in life to the fish. And she said, of course you would select a career that I'm allergic to. Of course she would. Absolutely. So that's the first trip. So that was the first trip.

SPEAKER_03 56:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 56:45

The second trip, I was 16 and I was fishing with my high school boyfriend. Okay. He was older. He was fishing in a bass tournament, and I was just on the boat. I wasn't actually fishing, but I was just on the boat.

SPEAKER_03 56:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 56:58

And we fished for five hours, didn't catch a single thing. And TMI, I needed to use the restroom, but was too afraid to ask him to stop because he was tournament fishing and he was intense.

SPEAKER_03 57:10

Right.

SPEAKER_04 57:11

So that was terrible. I didn't catch a single fish. He didn't catch a single fish. I hated it.

SPEAKER_01 57:17

Okay, hold on. I want to pause here because I didn't know we were going to go down this route. But no, I mean, seriously, Cynthia, this is so important. Um we talk about like how do we get more youth anglers involved? How do we get more women involved? Not having a restroom on a boat is kind of a it's a barrier. We don't understand it, guys. It's a barrier. It's a barrier. I mean, we're okay losing a sock here, there out in the middle of the woods. But it's a barrier.

SPEAKER_04 57:46

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 57:46

Um, one that we probably need to start thinking of some creative solutions are boat manufacturers to help us out.

SPEAKER_04 57:52

Yes, please. Because not all women are willing to lean off the side of a boat the way I am now as an adult.

SPEAKER_01 57:58

All right.

SPEAKER_04 57:58

But a 16-year-old me was not willing to do that.

SPEAKER_01 58:00

Especially with a boyfriend, you know, I get it. In tournaments. Yep. I get it. Uh, but the other one, you know, being four years old and having an older brother that can introduce you to fishing. ASA has a great stat, but if you're not introduced to fishing by the time you're 14 years old, you won't fish. Really? You being introduced by your brother also makes sense because almost every angler, youth angler is introduced by a male relative. Your brother stepped in and did that for you.

SPEAKER_03 58:29

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 58:30

And you never know, the point of this, you never know by taking a kid out fishing if you're gonna change their entire trajectory of life. And it didn't happen for you for quite a while after that. But once you once you re-engage with that passion, you now remember these three distinct fishing trips, albeit maybe because some horrible things happen in each one.

SPEAKER_04 58:54

Because none of them were good.

SPEAKER_01 58:56

But but you were introduced. And I think you know, yes, this podcast, if if we take an answer away from like what is watchy bass, that's awesome. If we take an answer away from how anglers can help science, that's awesome. But also take this away. Take a kid fishing. Yes, Bailey. Don't kidnap a kid, but go grab a kid and take them fishing.

SPEAKER_04 59:18

And there are tons of fishing groups actually in DFW. There are several fishing groups uh that their primary goal is to get people fishing. Like they're a huge Facebook presence. They welcome everyone from all walks of life. If you don't have any fishing gear, but you want to try it out, give us a call. We'll loan you some equipment.

SPEAKER_03 59:38

Right.

SPEAKER_04 59:38

If we have it, we'll give you the equipment to get them started. I can't tell you how many kids these anglers have been able to introduce to the sport that we know and love.

SPEAKER_01 59:50

Right. Okay, now, true or false, you dumped the tournament bass fisherman because he skunked that day.

SPEAKER_04 59:56

Yeah, true. True. No, no, because actually my third fishing trip was also with him.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:03

All right, tell us how horrible that one was.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:05

Went to a pay lake. In Texas, they call them stock tanks. Yep. But in Tennessee they were pay lakes. Okay. And go vaults. Um, we uh we went to a pay lake and you were allowed five fishing rods per person. So there were two of us. So we had 10 fishing rods out on the shoreline, which was ridiculous. Like I do not promote this whatsoever, but this was back in the late 90s, early 2000s. So you don't have to say that.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:30

Before before people were kind and courteous. But um, we get out there and he's rigging up all the rods. Rod number five catches a catfish.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:41

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:42

And he says, get it, get it, get it. So I get it, and I attempt a hook set, okay, which then crosses one through four. Catfish takes off, crosses six through nine, which he has ten in his hand, tangled up all nine rods. He almost dumped me for that. Yeah, I can imagine. So uh he was angry, we didn't take any catfish home, we were out, you know, the 50 bucks because it was 25 per person, and it was just it was not, it was not a quality experience.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:14

Yeah, you had three horrible experiences. Congratulations, but you get to college, you find your love of fresh water.

SPEAKER_04 1:01:23

Well, actually, I was still in saltwater in undergrad. So at Tennessee Tech University, you were allowed to get a biology degree with the Marine Sciences Concentration. Right. And what's crazy, you guys heard me mention Tennessee, Del Hollow Lake. I grew up 20 minutes from Del Hollow Lake, which means I was about 30 minutes from the fish hatchery that is right there that I did not know existed. Um, because my school never took a field trip there or anything like that. No offense to my school that just, you know, they didn't know how to guide me. So when I get to college, my undergraduate professor, Dr. Brad Cook, never tried to steer me to freshwater. He was just like, she wants saltwater, and he did everything he could to help me flourish in that field. So as part of the biology, marine science concentration program, I had to go to a coastal campus and take some courses in marine biology.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:23

That makes sense, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:24

And so I went to Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, which is the satellite campus of the University of Southern Mississippi in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and that was the best summer of my life to that point. Unfortunately, the coast had just been hit by Hurricane Katrina, and the campus was hit very hard, and they lost their entire specimen library. But silver lining, my class got to go out and collect all new specimens.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:51

That's amazing.

SPEAKER_04 1:02:52

And so we caught tons of sharks and fish and rays and jellyfish, so many things. I got to see so many. I saw a 10-foot tiger shark.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:05

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:06

A 10-foot tiger shark. Granted, we didn't pull it on the boat because it was far too big, but and it wouldn't have been safe. But I got to see all of that, and I actually got to reel in my first fish, which was a three-foot Atlantic shark no shark.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:20

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:21

And I was ecstatic. I was liking so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:25

So your first successful fishing trip was actually a coastal trip collecting specimen in college as undergrad. Amazing.

SPEAKER_04 1:03:31

Yes. And so then I get to my master's degree in Louisiana, where I got to do both coastal and saltwater. I'm sorry, coastal and inland fishery. But I still enjoyed the coastal fish the best. Red drum. Phenomenal. And so I still was like, I kind of want to do that. But then I loved the management. I love I wanted to be able to work with kids, and you're going to be able to do that the most with freshwater. So I stuck it, stuck out with freshwater, loved my project, got to talk about a fish that a lot of people didn't know much about, which was the yellow bass. There hadn't been a lot of research done on it. So I'm a little bit of a yellow bass expert, at least for the South. And then I started my PhD project at McCoo State University, where I got to study largemouth bass on the island of Puerto Rico.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:22

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:23

How does that work?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:24

With one of the amazing researchers.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:26

Dr. Wes Neal.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:27

Dr. Wes S Neal. Yes. So tell us about Puerto Rico. Bass aren't native there, right?

SPEAKER_04 1:04:33

They are not. They were introduced by Puerto Rico Department of Natural Environmental Resources. And going back to the great debate about Florida versus Northern, they thought they were introducing pure Florida bass. Dr. West Neal's lab was actually able to determine that they weren't pure Floridas, unfortunately. And so they are all integrates on the entire island. But it was Dr. West Neal who was actually able to figure out that the main reason that I didn't like fishing, because I never did it recreationally while I was in college. I only did it as part of courses. He's like, you don't dislike fishing. You don't know how to fish.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:17

It's a good clarification.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:18

And I said, okay. So I had just one of speaking competition, so I had a little cash prize with that. And he said, let's go to Bass Pro, let's frig you up. And then he and my lab mates all went to Pickwick Lake. Okay. I caught 15 different species in three days. Yeah. Best fishing trip ever.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:41

Which for all of us, we're like, Yeah, but how many bass did you catch? Me and Bailey are like, yeah, okay, 15 species, but what about the bass? Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:05:52

But but also because I was very new, I was and I was a novice, I was fishing with very small tackle, you know, lightweight tackle. So that I would have a better opportunity of catching more fish.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:03

And you caught crappie?

SPEAKER_04 1:06:04

Caught crappie. Caught some skipjack. Caught bowfin.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:09

Yeah. Oh wow.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:10

Shad um gosh. It was pretty I felt like it was everything in a lake.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:16

Amazing.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:17

It was it was so much fun.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:18

So we owe you being here in Texas and working so hard to make our inland fisheries better to Dr. Legends.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:26

Pretty much.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:26

Yeah, I love that.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:27

He's I mean I hate to give him that much credit.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:29

So he'll he'll clip this himself and he's an amazing artist.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:35

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:36

Yes.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:36

I don't even know if the man manages fish anymore because his art is so fantastic. It's amazing.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:43

Let's go back to Puerto Rico. Because I think our audience, some of us would like to travel to Puerto Rico. I'm going next year, so I want some tips.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:50

Are you gonna f what are you planning to fish for?

SPEAKER_01 1:06:53

I'm here to ask.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:54

Okay, well.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:55

I'm just gonna catch bass, though.

SPEAKER_04 1:06:57

Well, are you gonna catch largemouth? Are you gonna catch peacock? Is there a peacock bass on the island?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:03

Great question. School meet.

SPEAKER_04 1:07:04

Okay, so so some reservoirs only have largemouth, some reservoirs have both largemouth and peacock. Because thanks to the aquarium trade, several uh cichlid species, firehead cichlid, guapote tigray, which jaguar, jaguar guapote is the English translation of guapote tigre. Um beautiful, beautiful fish, but they are cichlids, so they grow quickly, and they often will grow too fast for largemouth bass to be able to eat them. So so they outgrow the gape width of largemouth. So peacock bass were introduced because they have a larger gape width than largemouth bass. To control them. To try to control them. It's not been very successful, but it has led to some phenomenal fisheries because you can it's really awesome to be fishing for largemouth bass, and all of a sudden you get this bright orange, yellow, and green behemoth on the end of your line that comes up and it has the big nodule like cichlids do. And I highly, highly, highly recommend you go to uh Oaxataca. It's gonna be on the west side of the island. Okay. That's that's that's where you want to go because that's where you're gonna get good largemouth bass and good peacock bass.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:21

Okay. And do I need to hire a guide or can I just run a boat?

SPEAKER_04 1:08:24

You can just run a boat, but there are plenty of guides specifically for Oaxataka, because it is one of the most popular fisheries on the island, or at least it was 10 years ago when I was there. It may have changed since then because they have unfortunately been hit by hurricanes a couple of times. But uh, that actually did lead to damaging the dam and the spillway at Guataka. So um it, I don't know if the fishery has rebounded, but when I was there, that was where you wanted to go. And in fact, my dissertation project, um, we are all familiar with bass crowding or stunned bass growth. Doesn't typically happen in tropical and subtropical systems because they will grow really fast, they get big really fast, they expend all their energy, and they die pretty quickly, normally less than six years. But in one particular reservoir, which I will butcher the name because I'm terrible at rolling the R's, but Cerrillos Reservoir is in the center of the island, it's just north of the city of Ponce, it's about a little over 500 acres. Uh, all the reservoirs there are municipal water sources, so there's no swimming, and management practices are limited to what you can do without chemicals. They will not allow chemicals in their water. Perfectly fine with that. But in this one particular reservoir, it's unlike most of the others, it is very deep, it's over 80 feet in some areas, and it's oligotrophic, so not very productive except in the upper reaches near the river, but it had a stunted bass population or bass crowding, which normally we would think, okay, it's a forage issue. So let's get out there and see what we can do about that. It had tons of forage, it had two species of sunfish plus thread fin shad, should not, and two species of tilapia, so should not have been a problem. But what we saw is the fish would go really quickly up to about 10 to 12 inches, and then the growth would just stop.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:24

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:10:25

You would have a few fish that would grow out of that bottleneck, but very few fish were above quality size, very few. So we used a study by David Willis from South Dakota, and where they had done annual removals of a certain biomass, and then they followed the population to see how it responded, to see if they could change the size structure. We tried doing that, and we hypothesized that it would happen faster for us than it did in South Dakota because they don't really have a winter. And we were correct. We removed so the bass population there when we started, their relative weight or their plumpness was at about 80, whatever the unit of relative weight is. Optimum, of course, is 100. So we decided, you know, just theoretically, okay, let's remove 20% of the population, the whole population, not just the crowded.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:25

How'd y'all determine the population size, the number of fish?

SPEAKER_04 1:11:29

So we did a standard um tag recapture mark recapture study for population assessment. And then within that, we found where the most crowded fish were. So fish within the 10 to 14 inch range were the fish that got removed. We did remove a few up to 16 inches when we would catch them, but it wasn't very often that we would. Um but any base so basically 10 to 18 inches is what we were willing to remove, but most of them were 10 to 14 inches that got removed.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:58

So removed 20% of the population via electrofishing.

SPEAKER_04 1:12:01

Via electrophishing, via electrophishing, electrofishing. And then we actually we did not sacrifice them, we actually hauled them to another reservoir to see how they would do. Um, and particularly we took them to Oaxataka Reservoir because the peacock bass had overwhelmed the largemouth bass population, so we were trying to get the largemouth re-established there. It was successful. Um, but we removed 20% of the total biomass of the population for two years in a row, and then we assessed the population through that time, and we were able to increase their relative weight value from 83 to 90 in those two years. Yep. So then we stopped because that's what Willis and them did. Right. And within one year, the population reverted back to where it was.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:53

Well, this wouldn't be an episode of real biology if we didn't talk about the harvest of bass. So I love that you had this path in your career whenever you were uh you know getting your PhD that you actually did this. And let's let's think about it for a second. 500-acre reservoir, remove 20% of a population, see a 7 to 10% increase over two years. The next year stop doing that and it reverts back. And the natural harvest by anglers in Puerto Rico is fairly low. Very low. Okay, so it's kind of mimics what we see here in Texas and what we see across the US, which is angler culture has declined uh to harvest fish. We are not a consumptive population anymore, so our Angler group lets fish go. By letting fish go, they are not gonna grow bigger in most scenarios. You don't have to say this, I'm saying this. It's okay. Um they're not gonna grow bigger in most scenarios without some sort of corrective measures. Either more forage, better water quality, more habitat, or harvest. In a lot of cases, it's all of those things.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:00

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:01

And it doesn't matter if they're northerns, integrates, or Floridas. Genetics can only showcase what the fishery will produce if everything's optimal. Yep. So you proved that. You proved a very similar concept to that in Puerto Rico, and it's amazing to me because it's like every guest, we we didn't talk about this beforehand. No, we did not. Bailey, we didn't talk about this beforehand.

SPEAKER_04 1:14:24

I did not know I was gonna be talking about Puerto Rico today.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:26

We did not, but every guest has this similar conversation about their reservoirs, either the ones they're currently working on or in the past, of if we could just get English to harvest, the fishery would improve. So theoretically, you guys harvested 20% and saw a 7% increase over two years. At some point, that's gonna level out. Like it's not just gonna be 7% better every single every two years. Right. But if English would have participated and maintained a 10-20% harvest across Red War, and you knew what that number was, how many fish needs to come out, a quota per year, the fisheries would have continued to improve. Possibly. I hope. I hope. Yeah, you would hope. That would be the theory, right? But we saw a decline within that first year of stopping. So at this point, it wouldn't be an episode of real biology if we didn't mention the need to harvest largemouth bass. And I think this is so cool because every single guest we have uh comes on the show and talks about some point in their career uh when harvest is so important to improving a fishery. And what you just said about uh your time in Puerto Rico and removing 20% of this population of a 500-acre reservoir uh showcases the fact that uh uh today we really don't harvest at a rate like we used to. Uh so our anglers aren't participating in making the fisheries better in that aspect of it. Right. Uh because we know uh we can do things like add forage, add habitat, like you mentioned, uh, you know, water quality improvement, especially on the municipal side. But that angler harvest component, the reason we have regulations, we're trying to get fish out of the system because it does improve everything. Um these are my words, they don't have to be your words.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:10

Well, I have I have a good example for you. Okay. So this so this is the example that I used in Puerto Rico to anglers there. Um, at least the ones that I could speak to. I would talk to them about Thanksgiving dinner.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:22

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 1:16:22

So if you invite 10 people to your house and you have a 10-pound turkey, then everybody gets one pound of turkey. Right. But if you only invite five people, then everybody gets two pounds of turkey. And so when I would talk to them about the bass, I said, yes, I completely understand the mentality of, well, if I put it back, it'll grow bigger. But there's only so much forage that a water body can hold. So if you take a few bass out, then you're leaving more forage available to the remaining bass. And at first, they hated the idea because their catch rates at this reservoir had been astronomical. Even electrofishing, we caught 100, 150 bass an hour.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:06

Right.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:07

But when they started fishing, because this is one of their favorite tournament lakes, they always caught large numbers, but they never caught larger fish. Well, then after my study, when they started seeing, on average, larger fish, more healthy fish, they loved it. And so then they were willing to harvest a few fish. And sometimes they would donate them to shelters or to schools or whoever they could send them to. And sometimes they would even sell uh there was very little waste, is what I'm trying to get at. If they they were actually utilizing the fish and then helping to develop their own quality fisheries.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:45

Yep, that's that is an example. You prove it in research, you got it anecdotal. Like, how do I get it through the English brains? That's exactly right. That's perfect.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:54

I have to I think about food, everything surrounds food.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:57

Love it. Bailey, uh, Cynthia and I are about to have to go teach students, the next generation, hopefully, of fisheries biologists. Do you have any anything else for her?

SPEAKER_00 1:18:08

Uh at this moment, no. I think you've entered a lot of the uh the angler theories over the years of uh multiple things from I can't say how many times, but like I'll be fishing with somebody, or you see it on a video, and they're all red lips. See that? That uh they're eating crawfish. I'll be throwing a jig or something along the lines of that. Um thank you for for solving all these quote unquote angler theories.

SPEAKER_04 1:18:28

And well, I I did not solve that. That was all uh soon to be Dr. Clay Rains. He's gonna be defending his dissertation later this year, and I know he's gonna pass the flying colors, and of course, you know, this wouldn't be possible without USGS, the Eastern Ecological Research Center, all of the state agencies that participate in the project, plus, of course, the anglers. And and Bailey, please, Stephen, please put my information in the comments, my email address. And so if anglers from anywhere want to reach out to me, uh, I am all about trying to answer questions. If I don't know the answer, I will try to find it for you. So please reach out to me. I am all about trying to connect anglers with scientists to get answers to their questions.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:15

And Dr. Foxholt loves these blotchy bass pictures. So please sending them to that email address. That'll be so much fun. Um thank you so much for being on the show.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:24

Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:25

Yeah, this has been fun. We're gonna go teach students. Uh, what's your next topic? Do you remember?

SPEAKER_04 1:19:30

Um, actually, scientific writing, so how to collect data in the field.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:33

Yeah, and mine is stakeholder meeting, and then I'm gonna teach uh a little bit of flipping and pitching.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:38

Uh correct technique. Do I get to participate?

SPEAKER_01 1:19:42

Sounds like sounds like you need a refresher course.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:44

Sounds like it. Yep.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:45

Yeah, we'll we'll have more success, I promise. Okay. Yep. Bailey, um, good to see you, brother.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:52

You as well, my man.

SPEAKER_04 1:19:53

Thanks, Bailey. It was great meeting you.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:54

Appreciate y'all. All right, that is gonna do it for today's episode. Again, a little bit of a rerun for you guys. We try to have some fillers out there because we know sometimes you can miss some episodes, but when we have content that is awesome, we like to put it back out there. In case you're new to the show or you might have missed the episode, it is awesome stuff to learn from, listen to. And I know you guys are a big fan of the real biology segment. So don't fret, we have more coming. We have new ones in the works with Steve. It's uh, as you guys know, we've talked about podcasting. The hardest part about our podcasting is scheduling. Uh, it might seem easier than you think, but it is actually quite challenging to line up schedules with guests, especially, but also Steve very being very busy, especially this time of year. We're doing our best to make sure you guys have some new and fresh shows coming to you. But thank you guys so much for taking time out of your day to listen to this. Look forward to the new episode, Mr. John Cruz, on Wednesday. Y'all are amazing, and we'll see you on the next one.