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Serious Angler Bass Fishing Podcast
The Serious Angler Bass Fishing Podcast is the headline show on the Serious Angler Podcast Network that is dedicated to all things bass fishing education. From top-tier angler interviews, fishing baits and techniques, boat and kayak tournament coverage, fantasy fishing previews – we cover it all!
Serious Angler Bass Fishing Podcast
Forward-Facing Sonar Just Broke Electrofishing Science
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The Serious Angler Bass Fishing Podcast sits down with Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation fisheries biologist Nate Hall for a deep dive into black bass management, harvest regulations, and cutting-edge electrofishing research. Nate breaks down Oklahoma's landmark 2022 length-limit change, why statewide bass harvest rates sit under 3%, and how genetic stunting affects bass growth in lakes across the country. The episode also covers groundbreaking forward-facing sonar research showing electrofishing boats miss up to 70% of large bass, plus Florida bass stocking success at the 34th parallel and fish care education for tournament anglers. A must-listen for bass anglers, fisheries students, and anyone interested in lake management, tournament fishing regulations, and bass biology.
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All right, folks, welcome back to Sears Anger Podcast and welcome back to another edition of The Real Biology. As always, with our man, Mr. Steven Barden, and I'm your host, Bailey Eichbrett. And Steve, how are things in the great state of Tejas?
SPEAKER_04Still hot, brother. Still hot. We're rocking and rolling. Getting ready for fall electro fishing. Getting excited for maybe a weather change. We got 10 more days of heat, I think, and then we'll change.
SPEAKER_02How hot is hot?
SPEAKER_04Uh 106 today. Water temperature to 94 on the surface.
SPEAKER_02That's unbelievable. So wait, real quick, uh, you mentioned fall electrofishing. Do you do it every single season, or are there only certain seasons where you go out and electrofish?
SPEAKER_04Uh in the summer months, your electrofishing uh gets inefficient. So electrofishing works, you know, for every boat's a little different. I would say eight foot depth. If your fish are beyond eight foot deep, you do not catch them with electrofishing. Also, metabolism is a little higher, the reaction to electricity is a little different. Uh, the amount of dissolved salts and minerals within the water changes with temperature. So everything kind of works against you as the water heats up. Uh uh on small bodies of water, like less than five acres, we may do an electrofishing survey when water temperature between 80 and 85. Anything above 85, it starts to really get tough. Um, to the point where, like, for example, I've got one fishery that we we electrofish weekly. We do a lot of harvest out of it. It's around 2,000 acres. And during the spring, we average an adult bass every minute. One bass being cold every minute of electrofishing. We catch more than that, but uh we can't coal them all. We have to put the better fish back. But we a coal every minute. In the summer months, uh, we stop electrofishing in July, August, and usually the first two weeks of September, uh, because we will get down to where we're catching a coal bass every 10 minutes to 20 minutes, uh, depending on how warm it is. So we just completely halt those activities. And we actually switched to only using angler harvest during that time. So I've got a couple of anglers uh that you know are MLF guys that I know really well that we have go out and fish the fisheries and they harvest and they can get um in an eight-hour day, they can typically do what I would traditionally do during the spring electrofishing over about a two-hour period. So I kind of know how they compare to my electrofishing boat when things are nice. Um yeah, electrofishing stops. Now we do in in private fisheries, I use spring electrofishing to qualify new clients and to determine if uh the recommendations that we made in the previous year were successful or not. Uh and then if we stocked something, let's say like threadfin shad in previous years, or we stocked fish that were tagged and we want to look at their survival, we would do that in the spring. In the fall, uh, we primarily do electrofishing for some harvest work or to build the budget for the next year. So we don't do many new clients. Uh we we primarily check our existing clients' lakes and then look at what recommendations will we be making next year.
SPEAKER_02Uh got it. Okay.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_04And state agencies, as you're going to hear, we've got a great guest today, Nate Hall. He's going to talk a lot about electrofishing. And state agencies do it completely different because they're targeting electrofishing for some different reasons, and they're going to use that one data set of electrophishing in concert with uh some other sampling methods and krill surveys to build fisheries reports that that aren't annual reports. They're more like uh periodic reports every four to five years, and they tell about the management over the next four or five years, where small bodies of water things happen so much faster, uh, you know, and we have budgets that are assigned to them. So we do that sampling every year. Got it.
SPEAKER_02Cool. Yeah, we have a long one today uh for the people, but a great one. Uh, and talking about, like you just said, all this and more. So I think uh without further ado, we should get on Mr. Nate Hall from Oklahoma. All right, folks. We are joined by Mr. Nate Hall from Oklahoma. Nate, appreciate the time, man. Appreciate you joining us. We had some fun already offline making fun of Steve, which is always one of my favorite pastimes. Uh, but uh appreciate you joining, man. It's uh it's good to hear from you. And how are things in good old Oklahoma?
SPEAKER_00Oh man, they're good. They're good. Uh it's a pleasure being here um out in Oklahoma, as you can imagine. It's hot. Um, but the bass are still biting and fish are people are still catching good fish. Uh I mean we had a 12-pounder caught here locally just a couple weeks ago um in a night tournament. So the big fish are still around, they just gotta find them.
SPEAKER_04So where was that under?
SPEAKER_00That was Lake Uji.
SPEAKER_02Ugie?
SPEAKER_00Ugie.
SPEAKER_02There we go.
SPEAKER_00Easy to C A. Yeah, it's an awesome lake. It's a beautiful gym that a lot of people uh overlook. Uh it's not very big, uh, but it's been fishing really well the last few years. So I highly recommend it if you're coming out to Northeast Oklahoma.
SPEAKER_04Nice. Love that. Uh, right off the top, a new destination lake.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I got I got a question just off the rip here. And this is to both of you guys.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So you there there's two sides of this coin when it comes to like the gems, right? When you talk about lakes that are kind of like on the down low and they're pumping them out. Like, we look at back at like how OHIV got exposed, and I'm sure there were some people that were like, oh dang, that people it's blowing up, people are hearing about it. In your position where Nate and Steve were like more so, I guess Nate being on the the state side, like when you're trying to promote the state and promote people there, but you're also an angler and you want to keep lakes kind of a secret, how do you guys deal with like the middle ground of you know what happens to a lake when you when it blows up, especially with social uh social media now, but also trying to encourage people to come fish your state? How do you guys manage that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean it it can be tough, you know. As a state agency biologist, um, especially in Oklahoma, the anglers pay my salary, and I work for the anglers and I want people to enjoy our fisheries and to find um all those secret spots. So um I don't mind sharing those good locations. Now I may not drop you to a pen to my special you know brush pile that I want to fish that's way offshore that nobody else knows about. But I'm down to tell you about the lakes um because I want you to enjoy what we work on and see the great work we do. Um and that lake and many others around the state are perfect examples of that. Um and if we don't show off what we do or don't talk about what we do, it's almost like we're not even doing anything. Um so come on down, enjoy the fishery, um, and that's what we're here for. If if something happens in the future because of increased angling pressure, our job is to mitigate that and try to work around that. So that's my take on it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and the truth, what what Nate's saying, there's a lot of truth to that. Because if you think about the how the money funds to the states, you've got a lot of license sales, uh, sport fish restoration dollars. So the more people that participate, the more money available to the agency to make improvements. So it makes most sense, chicken versus the egg situation here. It makes most sense that if those fish exist, you get more anglers to go catch them. That brings more anglers to the spot. That means you can make the fishery better.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Um if not, the lack of fishing pressure, the lack of license sales, like slowly the fisheries getting worse, and you don't have the money to fix it.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. Exactly. And you think if you think about stocking programs and states, you know, if we're stocking a water bike that nobody fishes, we're not gonna stock it anymore. Um, depending on your reason for stocking. But we gotta have that angler draw. There is no such thing as a fishery without the people.
SPEAKER_04Let me, this was not in the notes of what we were gonna cover, Nate, but I think it's it's a good point to stalking.
SPEAKER_02I I did remind him, Steve, that we we have no notes.
SPEAKER_04We have no notes. That's the worst part. That's the worst. You gotta keep up with my brain, Nate. It's gonna be a dangerous place. Uh I hear that. Uh so the question is, you know, based on stocking, uh, I know I know how most states do it. I've never asked anybody from Oklahoma directly, so let's chat about it. Assume you guys have districts, whatever you might call them, regions, districts. Um, do y'all appropriate stocking based on use, uh, need? Like how do you how do you make those decisions?
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, that's a good question. Uh, it really depends on the species, first and foremost, um, because our hatcheries have different capacities for different things. Um, so if we want to, the easy one to pick on is trout for trout stockings for say, um, those are based on a popularity by fishery basis and what water quality we have there. Um, so the lower Illinois watershed, that's a year-round trout fishery because it's a dam release tailwater and it's always cold. And so that one naturally gets less fish than some of our stocked um fisheries, uh, such as like Blue River and the Lower Mountain Fork, um, even though the Lower Mountain Fork also has um natural reproduction as well. So um, we do it kind of based on that. If you want to get into the bass uh side of things, um, it's not based on pressure, it's based off of what are the growth rates and what is the potential of the reservoir and where is it located in the state. And then thirdly, is what does our hatchery actually have? Um, so bass stockings in the state of Oklahoma, it is not the reason for that stocking is not to increase the population size in the lake, it's simply to augment the genetics or augment the fish that are already there. Um, and so we're not trying to stock 20 fish per acre in Grand Lake. We're trying to stock enough to make a genetic dent in a one one location. And if you know, pick on any small lake in Oklahoma, if Taft Lake is not producing trophy fish and it's not fished well and it's small, it's not gonna get our bass stockings if there's another lake that is already producing good fish because we don't want to put great genetics in a system that's already struggling.
SPEAKER_04Okay, yeah. So you would say uh as a general rule, recruitment is not really an issue across any of the Oklahoma fisheries. We don't have uh fisheries that just we're missing spawn classes or we're so habitat poor that we don't have recruitment, and therefore you're stalking to increase density. You don't really have that situation.
SPEAKER_00Not with black bass, no. Matter of fact, in most cases, we have too much recruitment. That's that's the issue, or too much little harvest, depending on how you want to look at that.
SPEAKER_04Exactly. So that's kind of one of the reasons we wanted you on the show is I use Oklahoma as one of my poster childs whenever I'm having this conversation with anglers of look at the entire state of Oklahoma and their regulation change as a conversation towards harvest. So I think we get right into it. Let's talk about what the regulation for black bass was pre-change and what it is today.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. So um in 2022 is when we did our big uh black bass uh regulation change. It hadn't been changed in 25 years prior to that or more. Um, so it was a really big move for us. It involved a lot of public comment, a lot of talking to focus groups and seeing what really needed to be done. Um and what that changed from is we previously we had a 14-inch minimum length limit with six fish per day. Um, so if your bass wasn't 14 inches long, whether it was a largemouth or a spot or a small mouth, you couldn't harvest it. Um, and so what we changed to is we changed to the same daily limit. So we didn't change that six fish per day combined with all three species, but now it's one, only one fish over 16 inches rather than a 14-inch minimum. So you can have five 12-inchers and one 16-incher. You just can't have more than one over 16. Um, and what this was in response to was a biological need that we had in our systems coupled with an a uh want to try to change angler attitudes. Um, so if you guys may or may not be familiar, but back in the 70s and even before that, harvest was very prominent for black bass. Um, it was something that everybody did, it was a prominent food fish. But slowly over time, as catch and release has gained in popularity, um, that has significantly declined. Um, and so what we were noticing is the majority of our reservoirs had length frequency distributions that were the majority of the fish were under 14 inches. So we're talking 50 or 60 percent of one of our electrofishing samples might be under 14 inches long. Um, and that's not a good distribution of lengths. We would like to see that dome much further along on the length category. Um and so we saw that in, I believe it was 2020, uh, the state of Florida made a regulation change that was exactly like ours. They also incorporated their tournament exemption program, and so we kind of modeled that after this. And it what it did was it did two things. Um, it actually allowed anglers to harvest fish. If the majority of our fish populations were under 14 inches, they couldn't harvest them even if they wanted to. So now they have the ability to harvest in the most abundant region of the population. And we were having an issue where we had reservoirs that we wanted to get rid of spotted bass. We were encouraging people to harvest spotted bass, but there was a big fear about harvesting the spotted bass because what's what if I identified it incorrectly and it's not 14 inches long? Um, and so the regulation also made it to where you don't have to worry about identifying the fish anymore. If it's under 16 inches, take it and get it out there. Um, and this regulation also, for the majority of the angling population, um, it protects those large individuals. So we know that tournament angling is popular, uh, but roughly only 30% of Oklahoma anglers are bass tournament fishermen. Um, so the other 70% of that population is still protecting those large individuals. Um ultimately doing something was better than nothing. Um, and so that's what that tournament regulate, that's what the regulation change was, and how that interacts with uh Oklahoma anglers.
SPEAKER_04So whenever you you said a lot there, Nate, and we're gonna dive into like different pieces. I think this is great. Let's do it. Um no, this is this is this is exactly the conversation we wanted to have. Um did was there a lot of study of age of fish at length? Like for the 14-inch, for the 12-inch fish, like what was our average age for largemouth across the state at 14 inches?
SPEAKER_00Oh man, across the state, that would be difficult because we have so many systems that are in so many different stages of growth. I mean, you you look at Grand Lake of the Cherokees and its growth rates are off the charts, and we're getting to 12 inches by age two, easy, you know, a lot of times age one. Um, so I would say you're looking at if I just had to guess with it depending on reservoir, or you were talking a three-year-old plus fish at 14 inches, uh, which isn't horrible, um, but it's not great either.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and I mean, I don't mean to put you on the spot like that. I'm just I'm gonna make a point to the audience, uh course. Um, as we start, as we start thinking about catch and release, think about, you know, you're just being taught to fish. You're sitting in the back of the boat, you catch one, and you know, a lot of us, the first time we went fishing was with like our our parents or grandparents, uncle, you know, aunt, something like that. And you catch a little fish, and what they immediately tell you is, oh, you got to release that one so it'll go get bigger. You know, and that's a practical thought. Like we think about humans, we're small, as we age, we get bigger in some ways.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_04Some ways not so much, but horizontally or vertically. Yeah, yeah. But we're getting bigger somehow. Fish aren't exactly going to do that.
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_04And so what what you're describing, Nate, is the majority of fish being sub-14 inches. That tells me that at some point uh 12 to 14 inches, you have some age-based stunting where you have, yeah, we have two, we have, you know, Grand Lake in two years you're getting to 12 inch, but from 12 to 14 may take an additional two years. And you have a percentage of the population that hits that 14 inch and they never get away from that. So they could be 10-year-old fish. Now you have uh you have outliers, of course, that Grand Lake wouldn't produce double-digit fish if we didn't have outliers. Right. Um, so it makes a lot of sense, but I think that's what's hard for English to see is that they can't age the fish on hoof. And I do think of it, uh, you know, Bailey, you're you're an active hunter. You hunt uh every season, you're getting ready for it right now. I saw you prepping the bow. And I think a little bit about we should do maybe a better job of relating it to a buck in the wild. And we think about the regulations that we have with bucks. I know um one of the concerns, like whenever you have a link-based antler ratio, you can you can harvest a buck if its antlers are wider than 12 inches. Well, that means that every buck that genetically grows up and not out is going to have a better chance of producing offspring. And if a buck could specialize in maybe never growing wider than 10 inches, it is protected its entire life.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_04So if we have bass that grow to 14 inches, well, sub-14 inches, we have bass that can grow to 13 inches, but never grow to 14 inches, their genetics pass on.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And the more I've thought about that, the more I'm like, man, you know, you have states like uh New Jersey. Brian the Carpenter always is like, if you harvest more fish in New Jersey, there's just no fish left. Um, that's well, it's kind of true, but the fish have such slow growth rates, and then they get stuck in that that length limit, and then we genetically just keep pushing that. Like, man, in 20 years, we may not have bass that grow beyond 12 inches in New Jersey, or you may not have bass if you'll make a regulation change that would grow beyond 14 inches in Oklahoma. Like that. Yeah, we could be headed that way.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah. And with the way I always explain it to people um, too, in terms of growth, is think about uh your your bass fishery. It could be Grand Lake or it could be a small pond you fish. Think of it as a town with only one grocery store that only gets a shipment of groceries once a year. If you have way too many mouths to feed and you run out of food, nobody's gonna grow and nobody's gonna prosper. And bass are generalist, they always do well with almost always do well with recruitment. They like to eat, they eat a lot, everybody knows that. Um, and they are not good, fish are not made to control their population based off of that. So they're going to continue to multiply, and those growth rates are going to continue to shrink. Um, and that's that's where we end up having an issue.
SPEAKER_04Got it. So you guys changed the regulation in 2022. What was the initial opinion of anglers? What do they say? Give me the give me the worst, you know what I mean? Like what were they saying to Oklahoma about this change?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, uh surprisingly, most were really um in favor of it. Um what the way that they were looking at this regulation, whether that's the way we intended it or not, is we have a lot of anglers looking at it as a trophy protection regulation. You can only keep one over 16, whereas before you could keep six that were 16 inches if you wanted to, you know, and so we are protecting trophy fish, which we are, but the other side of that gambit is we need to harvest that that smaller size frame. Um, so that was the the first initial gut reaction, is people really liked it because of that. Um, but as we started educating people, the other thing that came up was you know the tournament community. Well, I'm I don't want to fish a tournament if my five fish bag can only have one fish over 16 inches in it. Um, and so that actually came out in the public comment stage, and we were able to incorporate a tournament exemption process into our regulation just like Florida does. Um, and people really like that as well. Um, we have a high uh report rate, um, we have a high um instance of individuals using that exemption programming, they're legal if they don't, but it's still a free permit that they have to get. Um, and so it's been received really, really well. Um, what we're working on now is how is that perception long term? So is the regulation going to do what we want it to do and harvest those small. Smaller fish, or is it simply just protecting our large ones? Which at the end of the day is not a bad idea to protect the large ones, but it's not the whole purpose of the regulation. So we've been pleased with how the people have responded.
SPEAKER_04That's great. I mean, you never know with a large user group how people are going to respond. And that's I think that's a good unintended benefit is the protection aspect and that being the cultural conversation. Um how are you how is the state planning on assessing the actual use of the regulation and just participation? How do y'all how do y'all assess that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so uh we're just doing it based off of CRIL surveys and looking at harvest rates is the main that way that we're looking at that. Um, but not just harvest rates, but harvest attitudes as well. Um so there were several biologists throughout the state that right before the regulation changed and during the change, they were out doing angular surveys on reservoirs. And one of the questions they um were asking was, you know, what is your support of this regulation and how likely are you to harvest a bass should you catch illegal bass today? Um and so we have those metrics from that baseline level right before, right as we implemented the regulation. And now over the next five, 10 years, we're doing more surveys across the state and continuing to ask those same questions to see how far we have gone. Um, because a lot of this is education-based, right? Um, so not only are people harvesting fish more often, but are they more likely to if they occur on them?
SPEAKER_04So, what um from some of these krill surveys, what do we have? Do you have any cool um data points on pre-regulation change harvest rates?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so our our statewide Anglish survey in 2021, our statewide harvest rate for black bass was less than 3%. Um, and that's that's crazy low. Um, it's not it's a the percentage that we expected. Um, we expected it to be that low. Um, but I don't know that that 3% was a little surprising. So you're looking at 3% at the beginning, uh, when we were asking about um preference of the regulation, everybody loved it. They were uh five stars on the we love this regulation, we want to have it around. But then when you asked them the same question with the same scale of how likely are you to harvest a fish, they were asking if zero was an option on that scale of one to five. They they didn't want to harvest fish. Um, and a lot of times, depending on the reservoir, um, I'll pick on McGee Creek Reservoir in southern Oklahoma, it is a trophy largemouth lake. It was one of the only lakes in the state that had a different regulation. Um, it actually had a slot limit. But everybody there, nobody likes spotted bass. So when we ask that question to those anglers, they're like, well, if you if you're talking about spotted bass, I'm more like a four on that one to five scale. But if you talk about largemouth, I'm a zero because I'm a trophy angler and I want to put those back. Um so we're starting about as low as it could get right, and now we're seeing where is that going to go from here?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, let's um we always talk about bass, but we don't have to. Yeah. Do you have harvest reg or harvest participation for like crappie or walleye? Um paddlefish, trout, like do we have some of those comparable? Just I think it would be great for our audience to hear. We're at a 3% for black bass, specifically largemouth.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And these species that we all think are great to eat. What does that harvest rate look like?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. So I'd have to pull up that report to give you exact numbers, but the the estimate on that is, you know, with with crappie, you're looking at probably 30% harvest rate at paddle fish. Paddlefish is really hard to dictate because it's so different based on the two systems we have. Um, but paddle fish, you can also only keep two a year. So um some people just like to keep catching them. So that one's really hard. Walleye is about the same, about 20%. Um, we don't have a lot of walleye in the state, but we have a lot of sawgi and sauger. Um, and so those are are pretty high harvest rates. Um, and then you guys know your average bank fisherman with catfish, they're gonna harvest the things like crazy, you know. Um, so black bass is the one set of species in the state that nobody really wants to harvest, and that mentality is kind of gone. So now we have to educate anglers and try to get that mortality percentage up.
SPEAKER_04And I always think this is such an important point to make because whether you tried them or not, bass do not taste bad. There's I mean, you you can filet crappie and filet bass, they're eating very similar things in the ecosystem, they're coming out of the same water. Water quality dictates fish flavor more than anything else. Um but we do have it's a cultural thing because whenever you yeah, you can pick certain subsects of the fishing culture that will harvest fish and they harvest at a high rate. Um I mean, if if the numbers, which we're never going to hold you to that, don't don't worry about it, but if it's 30% on crappie, that is a huge difference than 3% on black bass.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And manipulation of their populations, it is hard for a manager to use a regulation and harvest as a tool to improve a fishery if it's at 3%. Right. And then, you know, you we can kind of put an asterisk next to that 3% and say that is purposeful harvest. And we can then talk about tournaments and some incidental harvest that occurs, whether during the event or post-release and the mortality associated with it, and those are uncontrollable by us. And they're the wrong fish whenever we're trophy fishermen.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And let's be honest here, Steve, and in terms of the are bass good to eat, they're a cousin to a crappie. A crappie is probably the second most harvested fish in the country, I would argue. Everybody loves it. Uh, you get into the northern latitude where Bailey's at, and that maybe go way down the list because you know they got yellow perch and all those up there. But, you know, we're talking about a fish that is quite literally a cousin to the to the bass. Um, they're eating the same things like you just said, they have beautiful white meat. Now, I'm not telling you to go flay every five-pounder you see. Um, but if you're out fishing and you catch 20 fish and 10 of those are under 14 inches, you should have probably should have kept your daily limit of those. If half of the fish you're catching are of a certain size, you know.
SPEAKER_04Well, I I think for this harvest quote conversation would be so much easier if the bass had driver's licenses with their age on them, and we could pull one out and be like, dude, you're 14 inches and you're 12 years old, you gotta go. Like that would make it easier. So one of the ways we do that in the private sector is you know, we use relative weight uh to to try to teach our clients. And in a way, I feel like culturally, trophy bass fishermen they could understand the relative weight thing, and we can start using relative weight, but you have to have a very open regulation like you guys possess in Oklahoma to make some of those differences. Because relative weight, uh, you know, Bailey, that just simply allows us to look at the body condition score of the fish. Uh where does it fall in comparison to its peers nationally?
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_04And you know, that's a reflection of a lot of things. Uh, some of those things might be water quality, forage availability, habitat density, the specific uh you know, life history of that fish. Did it grow up in a time of drought? Did it grow up in a time of high water, and its age, its current ability to actually capture forage, maybe when was the last couple of times that it was caught and released and what stress? There's so many things that go into it, but there are individuals in that water body that have a higher body condition score because they're more apt to compete in the current environment.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_04And I see that as a way that we'll continue to educate. And I know that Oklahoma, you you all are doing a lot of things, and I don't want to ignore all of them, so I want to kind of go down the list. But this regulation change, that that's like the big first bite of the apple. Um, you it's probably too early, you know, you're four years into it, probably too early to say, is it helping? Um but in some of the the early krill surveys, are you seeing any change in percentage of harvest or at least willingness to have that conversation?
SPEAKER_00So far, not really, but it's still early, right? Um, and so if you think about when we're doing these angular surveys, we're doing a roving reservoir krill over the course of an entire year. Um, so we're talking to a lot of people. Um the things that we have moved the needle on is more people know about the regulation than they ever have. Um, there are still high support for the regulation. And I would say, in my experience, we are moving the needle on likelihood to harvest. Um, they are scoring a little higher on that scale of one to five. However, what I I don't think we're seeing yet is I don't know that we're is seeing it increased harvest yet. Um, and that's something that I think just is gonna take time, um, as anything does, you know.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, time and education. Now you've you've mentioned multiple times spotted bass. Um it's always good with our audience if we if we clarify. Are we talking statewide, always spotted bass, or are we talking about a mixture of spotted bass and Alabama bass, or are we talking about all Alabama bass? What are we talking about when we talk about spots?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, uh to our knowledge in the state of Oklahoma, we don't do not have Alabama bass yet. So these are Kentucky spotted bass that we're speaking of. Um they are abundant here, they were in all the creeks and river channels that made up all the reservoirs we have. Um, and so they're inevitable. They're gonna show up. How big they are is gonna depend on a lot of different factors and how abundant they are. Um, but they are everywhere and they're Kentuckies.
SPEAKER_04Nice. So that's one less thing we have to be concerned with with the Alabama bass introduction. And that's the two common themes of this show is harvest more bass and let's not spread Alabama bass. So at least we can check one of those boxes. Um, but it it did sound like English are at least a little more willing to harvest the spots.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yeah, 100%. They are. And I I can't help but wonder if part of that is just because they don't reach the trophy size um that the largemouth do. So you don't have that caveat of, like you said, I want to release it and make it grow bigger. And a lot of people they catch a spotted bass and they think that's as big as it's gonna get, whether it was 10 inches or 14 inches, you know. Um, and so I think that has a lot to do with it. There's also some cultural to that, too. Um, spotted bass have been long since um harvested by the different Indian cultures and whatnot that have been around um the area. So there's that pressured as well.
SPEAKER_04That makes sense. And then you do have, of course, you have smallmouth that are being introduced. I want to talk about those, but you also have some endemic species that are regionalized. Yes. So okay. How many black bass species do we have in Oklahoma?
SPEAKER_00Uh we have three. Well, how many introduced or native? We do currently have uh so we're gonna have, let's see, five. So we're gonna have the largemouth bass, uh, which I lump the Floridas and the Northers together on that. That's just a personal opinion. And then we have our Kentucky spotted bass, we have our uh Tennessee strain smallmouth, then we have Neosho smallmouths, and then we have little river bass, uh, which is not officially described yet, but the little river bass is another small smallmouth that's up here in the Ozarks.
SPEAKER_04So the latter two are is there any protection or um is it specific protection for them from harvest, or are they under this black bass rule or they're under the same rule.
SPEAKER_00Um and there's no protections against them. And part of that is because uh, well, it is they just don't get that big, so we don't need a trophy regulation per se, but it there could be a scenario where we need to shorten the length limit in certain areas so that we're not harvesting all of our little river and neosha bass. Um that's something that's relatively new, so that's kind of on the the cusp, you know.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, so the little river has been described but not adopted, and the Neosha, if I'm correct, was adopted two years ago.
SPEAKER_00Yes, that's correct.
SPEAKER_04Okay, so yeah, I mean it takes a while. And um if I look in y'all's reg book, it probably just still says smallmouth, it doesn't say Neosha. Is that right?
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_04Okay, yeah, yep, that makes sense to me. So it it'll be a water body protection, if anything.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yeah, and just much like the Florida bass versus the northern bass, it's really, really hard, almost impossible to identify a Neosha bass from a Tennessee smallmouth bass. Um, there's very, very little difference visually um between the two fish, and so it's not something where I want anglers to go out to Grand Lake and only harvest the Tennessees and not the Neoshows, because it's just not possible. Um and there is some Neoshows in Grand Lake.
SPEAKER_04Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yes. So whenever you'll have smallmouth in a hatchery system, they're not the Neosho. They're they're whatever you're using, which they came from Tennessee, is what I'm hearing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they were Tennessee's back in the 80s. Uh we haven't stocked any smallmouths since the 80s.
SPEAKER_04Okay, so the everything that's in the state now is just uh self-sustaining population.
SPEAKER_00Yes, yes. Um, and we've been doing a lot of genetics work on the Neoshos and the Little River bass as of the last couple years since they've been um officially described. Um, and what we're finding is that a lot of the Neoshos have very muddy genetics at the moment. There's a lot of interbreeding between the two species. Um and that's what a lot of people bring up as well. You know, it's the wildlife department's fault because you guys put Tennessee strain in back in the 80s. Um, and they're not wrong. Um state agencies make mistakes all the time, and we're willing to make those. And stocking those fish wasn't necessarily the best decision, but it's also a decision that it's one of those, what we know now is not what we knew then. We had no idea that Neoshos were around back in the 80s.
SPEAKER_04It's impossible to hold today's fisheries to the standards of fishery science at the time that the decision was made. You can't go back and say, well, to based on today's technology, because if you do that, uh in 10 more years, the technology that will show up will mean something that you're doing is incorrect today. And then you would be locked in a paralyzed state of I can't do anything because of future technology that may or may not exist. So I think that as long as you're making decisions that are based on the best available information at the time as a biologist, you're doing the right thing. Um at the end of the day, um you are managing fish in an artificial system because it has been made. Uh how many natural lakes do you have in Oklahoma?
SPEAKER_01Two.
SPEAKER_04Two. Yeah. So that's you know typically it's it's tough to, you know, you'll do have natural creeks and river systems that that are being uh manipulated by the reservoirs that do exist today. But you are, for the most part, managing your sport fish in reservoirs. It's probably a different team. You'll have like a streams team that is managing uh yep, that's that's exactly what I would guess. So other internal conflicts we're all gonna have, but it sounds like y'all are doing a wonderful job of really looking forward thinking on this regulation change. I can't wait to hear you know, a day when we start having the conversation of we went from 3% to 6%, yeah, which is double, and that's huge.
SPEAKER_00It would be huge, it would be huge. And obviously, we you know our systems probably need more than that. Um, it's gonna be system specific. Some systems may need 20%. Um, but if we double our harvest rate, we're that much better. Um, and this was something I wanted to say a second ago, but you know, a perfect example, you were alluded to the fact that obviously fish die every year, whether an angler takes them out of the water or not. Um, so I'll use Grand Lake as an example. We have a metric that we call annualized mortality in our systems, and that's the number the percentage of the fish of the population that die every single year amongst all the ways a fish could die. So if our harvest rates are only 3% and our annualized mortality is 40%, you're losing 37% of your population a year and nobody's doing anything with them. They're sinking to the bottom of the lake in their turtle food. So at that point, you also have to ask yourself, well, if there are a lot of fish dying every year, you see start to see that the impact of you harvesting five fish a week is not that big a deal. You know, keeping a daily limit every day, if everyone did that, that might be a little bit different. But we plan for that when we make regulations because they are a tool, as you were saying earlier, Steve.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean, my biggest fear is that we keep down this catch-and-release ethic, and and I made the point in last week's episode that you know I worked for Major League Fishing, and and we have really promoted the fact that when an angler is competing at the highest level, that uh part of their responsibility is not to prove that they're the best at fish care, it's to prove they're the best angler, and they should leave that resource better than when they found it. And part of that is the catch-way and immediate release ethic. It allows us to not disrupt spawning, not change population dynamics by moving fish, and not cause mortality of large fish, even if it's a small percentage. And like you mentioned, if a tournament has a 99% live release rate, we have 1% of fish die, that is a drop in the bucket of 37% annual mortality. It's still the wrong fish for the wrong reason. Uh it's not just tournament anglers. We do have uh, you know, hobby anglers that want to take some, you know, some photos, they want they want some social media credit for their fish catches. Those are fish that are unfortunately a percentage of them are going to go through a post-release mortality because of the stress.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04The point is always what fish are we using and why? And if we are recreational anglers and we're enjoying the fishery, uh, we can improve it by harvesting small fish. If we are professional anglers and we're showcasing our skill level on Major League fishing side, like yes, we want it to be catch, weight, and release. We're working hard every day. But uh we could move that needle the wrong way and we could make it to where even fewer fish are harvested, and that is a bad thing. And and I don't want to remove a tool from your toolbox because we're trying to showcase the fishery the correct way.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well said.
SPEAKER_04Now um I'd love the tournament exemption. I know that on a personal note that you guys uh across the state are working, especially when we're talking about youth anglers, on improving our fish care skills. So this is not just an episode about harvest. I want to hear a little bit about what Oklahoma can talk about, is doing when it comes to just fish care education.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, so as you mentioned, Steve, we have a tournament exemption process. They have the free permit, um, but that gives us a lot of tools other than just a permit. We now have all the tournament directors' contact information. They do submit a report to us at the end of every tournament that tells us what they catch, which gives us super valuable information as to what our anglers are catching. Um, because we can't be at every lake every year or sample the whole reservoir. So we need that data. But what it also does is it gives us an opportunity to have a dialogue with all of our directors. Um, and so what we've done a lot lately is sending those directors um targeted emails about what this is what you should be doing in the realm of fish care. Um, we have some biologists throughout the state who are having uh meetings and presentations with uh youth leagues and high school leagues to tell them, you know, this these are the do's and don'ts. Uh, when the water temp is 75 degrees, you need to be icing your live well, but don't ice it too much because you're thermal shocking the fish and things like that. And so that's kind of where it started. Um, but really recently we've been working on an initiative to get out um videos. Um, so many of you guys may or may not be aware. There's actually a book called Keeping Bass Alive that's been out for a long time. It's a pamphlet put out by BASS um with the authors are Gene Gilland Um and uh Hal Schram. Um Gene was a biologist for Oklahoma. Um and so that's go ahead, Bailey.
SPEAKER_02I said I was joking, making a dumb joke saying I never heard of him. Never heard of him? You've had him on here multiple times. Sorry. Sorry, bad joke.
SPEAKER_00You're good. So keeping bass alive has been a long time, but a lot of people don't know about it. And so we are in the 21st century. Everything is digitized, and that's something that hasn't quite been digitized the way it could be. So we've been working with Gene and BASS and Major League Fishing to take this Keeping Bass Alive book and turn it into videos for the masses. And that's something that we got a lot of tournament anglers buy-in. We're able to use their audiences to get the message of what does that look like? And that alludes, you know, to Steve, what you were talking about a second ago about professional anglers leaving fisheries better than they found them, just educating the next generation and educating the other anglers to do that. So that's something that we're hoping to put out here shortly in the next year or so, and maybe even less is here's a series of videos that show you exactly the do's and don'ts, and it's more palatable to everybody, including kids.
SPEAKER_04I mean, you guys have such diverse fisheries. Um in the leagues, uh the major leagues travel there often. You know, Oklahoma is is on the schedule for somebody every year, if not once, multiple times. And high school tournaments, uh, you know, we we are seeing more anglers participating. Um and I mean I'm sure that now that you have the database, you're starting to get a little bit of insight into what is happening on Thursday nights, jackpots, weekends that you weren't aware of. And that uh I'm sure that that database is starting to surprise you, just the the popularity of just natural tournaments that happen that uh aren't published.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04And uh whenever a league comes, uh they bring infrastructure. And Gene talks about this a lot, you know, live release boats, uh, you know, equipment for the weigh-in, the uh the bags, the aerated tanks, the dissolved oxygen, like we have everything to minimize mortality, fizzing, professional fizzers that just know how to treat barotoma. Um, those things don't always happen at smaller events just because of infrastructure. And I I applaud you guys as a state for coming out with with those videos, and like you said, just modernizing that resource that has been around um and and has fish care hasn't really changed over 20 years if you take catchway and immediate release out of it. Uh Hal and Gene, um Hal Hal Tram did an amazing amount of work, and there are other biologists, Stephen Cook, you know, there's there's dozens. We all kind of we all sit on the shoulders of each other and we we progress the work as a community. But the work that was done really the late 80s, early 90s solidified what fish care should look like, um, what the live wall should do, how we should. And there's still things that we're not doing. I mean, every angler should be monitoring live wall temperature, dissolved oxygen should be part of a conversation. Um but I applaud you guys for taking the next step, putting the Oklahoma layer in that in that pyramid of this is what fish care should be.
SPEAKER_00Right. Yeah, exactly. And we at the end of the day, you know, we owe it to our anglers to do that. Um, I have a common saying that I got from all of the uh old guys before me is you don't know what you don't know till you don't know it. Um, and so if anglers have no idea that um the fish that's laying on its side in their life well needs to be fizzed, or that the fish with a bubble in its eye needs to be fizzed. If there's no obvious signs, if they don't know that, then that fish is gonna die at the end of the day. Um, and so we want to give them the tools to succeed if if at all possible.
SPEAKER_04So true, so true. Well, I mean, this is uh you can't have a harvest conversation if you don't have uh some protection for tournaments. It's a great way to get people introduced to the sport and stay active in the sport, and you can't have a tournament conversation if you don't talk about fish care. So you got to have all three of those. And uh, you know, any scientist that can stand and talk about I need harvest, and here's where it needs to be, and also you need to protect these fish, and here's how to do it. Those are the those are the ones that are the true leaders, and we applaud you, Nate, and the entire department for being those leaders.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, well, we we appreciate that. Um, and it's important to note on the fish care side of things that um this is not something that only the tournament director does. This is something that involves every anchor because the tournament director can have the uh water-filled bags, they can have the aeration, they can have ice for their troughs. But if your fish has been sitting in a live well that's at 85 degrees for five hours, you've already done way too much damage to the fish. That its time in cool water is actually probably gonna hurt it, not help it. Um, and so that's something that's important to know. It comes down to every angler for sure.
SPEAKER_04That's a great point. And I don't um I love this conversation, but I want to be mindful of your time, and I I want to give you plenty of time for us to discuss one of the hottest topics in fishing and how you're using it as a professional. And um you and I we didn't really know each other well, let's say five years ago, but we were kind of working on a parallel path, we just didn't know it. Uh studying what the heck could we do with forward-facing sonar, specifically with electrofishing. I want you to tell where the thought came from, where the story, you know, what what your research has been like, and how you are using forward-facing sonar with electrofishing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Uh so I mean, we as biologists, we want to use technology to the best of our ability. Um, and when live imaging sonar came onto the scene, there was a lot of biologists like you and me that were wondering if it had utility for us. I mean, we use side and down scan stuff all the time, so why not live sonar itself? Um, and where that kind of came to a head for me is I was working on my master's project and I was looking at something that we call um bias of electrofishing gear. So, what I was trying to learn is why don't we see very big fish? Um, my first year on the job with ODWC, we were sampled an 11-pounder, three 10-pounders, and more than 10 nine-pounders. Um, my first year on the job, I thought electrofishing was the greatest thing ever. There's double-digit fish everywhere. Um, this is the ultimate cheat code, right? Talking to the biologist I worked with at the time, that's not the case. You know, he's like, I Nate, I've worked here 25 years, and that's a once-in-a-lifetime electrofishing season. You're never going to achieve that again. Um, and so I started thinking about why don't we see them often? Um as I was looking into the science of okay, let's measure voltage below the boat, and let's look at escapement with telemetry aspect. I started thinking, well, what if we could just see underneath the water and know what the fish were doing while the boat is chasing them? Um in science, as we're learning about how to use the electrophishing boat, we we hear about how it's not just shocking everything in the cove underneath you. It has a drawing effect, like a fish gotta be so close. Well, what does that actually look like? Um and that's when I had the idea to let's just throw a live imaging sonar in the water on the front of the boat, and before we even design a project, let's see what happens, you know. Like I told my boss, I might be making a $4,000 mistake, but we're gonna try it, you know. Um, and so we put that sonar on the front of the boat and we stepped on the pedal, and the results were staggering as to what we could see. All of a sudden, what we normally see on an electrofishing boat, which is five to ten fish, you know, every so many feet rolling over and floating to the surface. We were seeing that on the sonar, but we were also seeing all these other fish under the water that was darting all different directions or thrashing at a certain depth. Um, and so that's what really kicked off this idea of let's take this opportunity of a master's research project to not only look at size bias, but to look at the use of forward-facing sonar to quantify that bias and look at the fishery at the same time. Um and the things we learned were were pretty crazy. Um, it's starting to buzz. I've I've had a few emails in the last week or so as that uh paper is in the publication process of people wondering how they can use this for XYZ. Um, and what what we learned is that you know, us biologists tell people all the time that when we go into a cove and we shock bass, there's still fish there. We didn't get them all. A lot of people don't believe us. Well, what we learned is that we're getting maybe 70 or we're getting maybe 30% of them. 70% of those fish are escaping the boat for one reason or another. And without Ford Facing Sonar, we we couldn't have learned that. So uh we used a Loranta active target, that's what we had access to. Uh we put it in what I like to call gangster style, so we put it in scout mode. Um we looked out in front of the boat and watched those fish at a distance of 40 feet, and what we found out is that at 14 feet, those fish are kind of drawn to the boat and they may or may not be caught. Um, but when you get into 12 feet, now they can't help themselves and they're always going to be caught. But in that zone of 12 to we can even go out to 20 feet, 90% of those fish are escaping, they're just getting out of the way of the boat. Um, and that tells us as managers that if I only see two nine-pounders in an electrofishing season, there's actually a lot more nine-pounders out there than I realized. I mean, that has vast implications on management because if I only look at my electrofishing data and I don't look at angling data and I don't have this on the front of the boat, I might make a management decision or a regulation that is going to affect the number of large fish when I didn't have a low number of them to begin with. I actually had a high number of them. Um, and so that's been the biggest thing with that project is learning that the gear doesn't catch the big fish very often, and we're missing a lot of them when we go out. Um and that was because of the sonar.
SPEAKER_04That's a great synopsis. I um I went through the same thing. Um, you know, Nate, you and I have had this conversation a lot. Um my differential list is uh for anybody who's who's gonna try it. Um first thing you're gonna know when you down pedal your booms, your actual electrodes will uh eliminate. And so you can then say I have power to the front or I don't. You also see when you off-pedal, it takes a second.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04So when you think you're done electro fishing and you let off the pedal, give yourself 30 seconds before you make any big adjustments. Um I like you said, uh both scout mode and forward mode, uh, they will tell you two different things. Uh scout mode to me gives me a left and a right and a forward distance of how big is my electric field. You can't see it, but you can see the impact area for your fish. And then forward mode, if you want to know that same thing for below the boat, you can see how deep. Um, you know, a lot of us standardize electrofishing at eight foot or shallower, and you can see there's a depth in which electrofishing stops working, uh, or the fish aren't impacted. The no more Galvano Texas, that's our big word for the day. Galvano, Texas.
SPEAKER_02Um but is that a place in Texas, or are you saying like an actual word? Galvano, Texas, like a city in Texas.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, Galvano, Texas.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, okay. I literally thought you were talking about a place in Texas.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_04Thanks. Thanks for interrupting, Baylor. We were talking about two for two today. But you you can see your depth. Um we we did not whenever I did mine, mate, I compared pre-electro fishing or pre-forward-facing data to post-forward-facing data, and I didn't change my catch rates at all. Uh, it wasn't like I was catching more fish because I had it. I was also very conscious of my bias whenever I'm using it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04I would I would say our boat um had about a 10% catch rate on average. We do a lot of martery capture studies, so I had already kind of figured that out through march recapture. Uh, but I I think about a 10% catch rate on average, you will have fisheries because of some water chemistry, temperature, just how the fish are setting up habitat topography, that you have a higher rate. Uh, it just depends on where you are and what you're what you're targeting. And then we did uh we did some target removal of things like tilapia, grass carp, hybrid strike bass. That's when it gets really fun. Because once you do what Nate described and you say, okay, well, anything within 12 foot is kind of the target range, then you're off-pedal. Then you're just driving around, you're finding big fish, you get them within 12 foot, then you down pedal and you increase your your capture rate. So there's there's a lot. Um your project specifically, do you want to walk us through a little bit about how you set the boat up and how you how you quantified some of these things?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, sure, I can do that. Um, so we've the way we were setting the boat up is we we have two uh booms that extend the front of the boat that have metal droppers that are um actually putting the electricity into the water, right? Um so we got a generator that's applying power to a box, and we're controlling that power um there and it's sending out so we we wanted for our study, the reason we chose scout mode is because I wanted to see a full gambit in front of the boat of what was going on. Um I didn't want to have to have it on forward mode and have to swivel that transducer back and forth to see left and right because of that 18-degree cone angle, right? Um so we get it in gangster style, we lose a little bit of data, but it was the data we needed, is what we were getting. Um, so now I can see on both sides of the boat. Um, and then we would do our electrofishing transects. So we had two reservoirs that were actually at a hatchery. Um, they're water storage reservoirs, so they behave just like a reservoir system that you and I would go fish on a daily basis. They have wild populations in them, but the reason we chose those was because it was very controlled, right? The public couldn't come take fish out of it that I was tagging. Um, it had relatively uh shallow slopes, so we're not talking about a two-foot to a 16-foot drop. That would heavily uh bias our estimates on our study. And so we would just do those in paralleling the bank, which is what we do in our standardized sampling protocol in lakes. Um we would drive for 10 minutes and we would net every bass that came up. During that 10-minute transect, we're also recording sonar the entire time. And we're putting the fish marks that we reviewed later, we're putting those into four different categories based on how that fish behaves when it leaves the screen. Um so we had fish that were completely unaffected, they just behave what we would consider as normally no erratic swimming. Um then we had fish that were startled and they escaped, so they've exhibited some kind of an eragmant movement and then they left the screen. And then we had ones that maybe were immobilized a little bit and escaped, so we start to see some of the narcosis or the galvanotaxis behavior, we see a little bit of that, but then for some reason or another they come awake and they leave. Um, and then the last category are ones that were completely immobilized and we could have caught them. So they've either floated off screen, or in a lot of cases, with the way our transducer was set up on the front of the boat, you actually see the net come down and get them. Um, and so we reviewed, I want to say it was 850 minutes of sonar footage and counted fish and put them in those direct categories. Um, and that's how we knew how efficient our boat was and what that field was. Um, and that was a good point you brought up, Steve, that I didn't mention was for biologists, if I need to go collect striped bass broodstock, um, or I need to collect big fish for age and growth data, um, and I don't necessarily care about our catch rates, I can drive around off-pedal. We did that in our study. We had power on versus power off trials with the sonar. And when the power's not on, we can get within 10 feet of the fish before it spooks really easily, even with the big motor on. And I know a lot of anglers talk about the big motor versus the trolling motor. I think you can get a lot closer than you think with the big motor. Um, and so we could get within 10 feet, but if we had that pedal on the whole time, as is with our standard survey, they're escaping at a large distance. So uh we also had a component of the study where we put uh radio telemetry tags in fish so that we could track them and know their exact position. And we would compare their position before the boat passed to after the boat passed to kind of get an idea of um what does that fish do once it leaves the screen? Is it going to deep water or is it going to shallow water? Because in the fisheries field, there was a lot of different theories as to why we don't catch those big fish. And one of those was that they live in deeper water by themselves more often, which is out of the range of the boat, or they simply just escape to deeper water. Um, and so with that telemetry aspect, we were able to learn that we were right, but we were also wrong. Um they do live in deeper water, they are harder to get that electricity to them, but they when they escape, they don't really go anywhere. Um on average, they were only they weren't moving very far at all. We don't have a really dialed-in scope on that radio telemetry. I can't tell you they move five feet, but I can tell you that their movement was not measurable with the antenna that I heard. Um, so that was another portion of the study, as well as just marking and recapturing a ton of fish, which if you're doing a master's degree, pick one where you can go fishing like I did, because it you know reduces stress a lot. Does that answer your question, Steve?
SPEAKER_04Not always, yeah. This is this is exactly what I wanted to talk about. I think um one of the questions I asked you the first time we talked about this was how frustrated did it make you as uh the driver of an electro fishing boat once you could see the fish and not catch them?
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah, yeah, it it was bad. I had to so we were recording the sonar with an iPad, and the first few times that we did that, I would have the iPad sitting right on the console where I could see it, and I had to put it in the floor. Um, because it it really, especially from a standardized sampling standpoint, it made me want to stop the boat or put it in reverse a lot to catch all those fish that we were missing. Um that's just not something we can do.
SPEAKER_04The first time I did it, I um I can remember the fish coming up on the screen. I'm watching fish come up on the screen, so I'm yelling to the crew, right side, left side, yeah, like there's a good one, go, go, go, you know, and I'm and then I realize they can't see any of that, right? They can't know the fish and go, yeah, and then and then by the time I'm yelling all this, I see 15 fish and they scoop two, and I'm like, what is going on? Why are you all that bad at netting? Like, what is happening? Yeah, and you realize really quickly, no, it's just they have to come really close to the surface. And so for years, I just you know I've been driving over 90% of the fish.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. And what you quickly realize too, and and Steve, you you know this, and Bailey, maybe you do, if Steve's been nice and has taken you out on the shock boat, but it's not very it's not as easy as it looks to net the fish either, especially if they're two or three feet under the water. I mean, you would think it would be as easy as a fish, you know, catching a fish in a barrel, like people say, but it's not. No, maybe the net down there, it's not easy.
SPEAKER_04Maybe for some of our audience, you know, we've got a lot of angler audience. Bailey's Bailey's grandmother listens to this as well. How important is electrofishing to a fisheries professional? Like, um, specifically if I was in Oklahoma, yeah. How frequently am I electrofishing a reservoir that I'm managing?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Uh electrofishing is the one and only and best tool to sample uh largemouth bass. Um, every gear that we have tried to sample black bass with um is just not as efficient. Uh it's the most efficient use of our time, um, but it also gives us um the most reliable data in terms of what does the breadth of the population look like size-wise and number wise. Um, there's been other gears that people have used, like gill nets and trap nets, and then just plain angling. Um, and all of those are so heavily biased in some direction that it's really hard to trust your data. Um, so it's the number one gear for a reason. That's why it's been so heavily studied, and that's why I studied it. Um, but in Oklahoma, most of our lakes are on a three year rotation. Um, there's only so many of us, myself in the northeast. I have eight water bodies that I manage. I can't get to all eight every spring. So we do electrofishing in the spring and we do it at water temps between 60 and 75 degrees. And so you guys as anglers know once that water hits upper 60s, it heats up quick. It doesn't take it very long to get past 75 degrees. And the reason for that temp range is for the safety of the fish. So if the water temps 80 degrees, we're not going to go out and sample because A, we don't want to hurt the fish, and B, it affects the catch rates. So we have a limited amount of time. So that's why me as a biologist can only get to uh certain lakes once every three years. Um it's also good for the fish too, because we're not impacting it. A lot of people think we impact the population heavily, um, and we really don't for a lot of reasons.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean, um, one of the early myths that uh that I encountered, I do I'm gonna say 225 electrofishing surveys a year, one-hour surveys. Uh we do both spring and fall, so we get some extra time. And okay, we can, you know, depending on the size of water body, we can do two to three a day uh when we're really going. But one of the myths I encountered quick was that electrofishing sterilized all the bass.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04So the more you do it, the more sterile fish you have, which I, as a young biologist, was like, excellent. Let's uh if that is true, let me electrofish your lake like 15 times this year so I can sterilize all the bass, and you would never have reproduction. I'm just growing all to be 12 pound fish. Like that is easy. Exactly. If that were true, our lives would be so much easier. But unfortunately, that one's not true.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of uh common misconceptions out there. You know, the biggest one we hear in Oklahoma is that we're disrupting the spawn um by shocking fish. Um, and if you think about it, for well, for one, electrofishing is is uh non-lethal. Um the fish are knocked out just like you, a boxer gets knocked out in the ring, they're awake in five minutes and they're acting normal. Um so that's for one. And and probably on a regular survey, probably 60% of the fish we catch go right back in the lake anyway. Some of them we have to keep for agent growth data, but the majority of them go right back in the lake, really close to where they were caught anyhow. Um, but if you think about how many we miss with the electrofisher, and you think about the scale at which we're doing this, you know, in 10 minutes of electrofishing, which is what we do in Oklahoma for a standard unit, I might be covering 200 yards of shoreline. So now let's take that to the size of Grand Lake. Grand Lake has 1,300 miles of shoreline. And we do 24 10-minute units. So I'll let you guys do the math as to how many miles of shoreline 200 yards times 24 is, but it's not very much.
SPEAKER_02I don't know, man. Sounds like you're messing up the whole spawn in every lake in Oklahoma.
SPEAKER_04If and if that were true, Oklahoma would not have changed the regulation to bring this back full circle. We wouldn't have over-recruitment. So, once again, that would be a lovely tool if we could really get it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, it would be.
SPEAKER_04Nate, is there anything else uh really great going on in Oklahoma and your work that that we haven't covered that you want to make sure we talk about?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, I I always want to highlight the things we do, and one of the things you hit on with your sterilization example is one thing I want to bring up is that um Oklahoma stocks Florida bass. We do every year, we have been for 20 years. The reason I bring up the sterile thing is because is and I find that really funny is we shock our brood fish out of ponds in the hatchery every year to put them in spawning ponds. So they're definitely not sterile because they're still producing fish for you know seven years.
SPEAKER_04I'll add it to my list of uh whenever somebody brings that up, I'll add it to my list of things that I say to counter their myth. I'll be like, Oklahoma shocks their fish every year for their hatchery.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there you go. Perfect. Yeah, we actually have a joke that the the only reason they spawn is because we shock them. Without being shocked, they just won't do it.
SPEAKER_04Oh, they like it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_02A little tickle.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Uh so we do have a Florida stocking program. We've been doing that for 20 years. Um, and we, like I said earlier in our conversation, we do that based on water productivity, is one of the main reasons for that. Um, but something that has kind of been new that we're watching here in northeast Oklahoma is everybody's heard of us talk about the 3400 parallel, and Florida bass can't be stocked above that. Well, Lake Uchi, that I mentioned earlier, is one of the is a water body that we've been experimenting with with Florida bass stockings. Um, and we don't know yet, but that 12-pound fish um that was caught not too long ago, we did get a fin clip of that fish, and it could be one of the first Florida bass we stocked in Uchi. Um, and that was 11 years ago, or 10 years ago, the fish was one year old when it was stocked. Um so coincidentally, it's a high likelihood that that may be one of those Florida fish. Um but what makes Uchi unique, what makes Uchi unique is we stocked fingerling Florida bass in Grand Lake for about 10 years. Um and it didn't work, it never stuck. We never could find the fish the next year. Our theory is that um because of our cold winters here above the 3400 parallel, those young fish don't have the fat reserves to make it all winter long when they're stocked as fingerlings in the spring. Um, and so to do an experiment with Uchi, we started stocking age one fish. So they've stayed in a hatchery for their whole first year. They've been fed on pellets and koi and all the stuff that we uh feed the fish when we keep them on hatchery, and then we stock them at age ones. Okay, now that they're larger, now they're eight to twelve inches long, can they survive that first year better? And what we're finding is they're surviving much better. We're finding them every single year in the reservoir. They are persisting and maybe, just maybe, even producing really large fish. Um, so that's something that I wanted to highlight was that we do stock Florida bass, it does seem to be working in the 3400 parallel thing. We might be figuring something out there.
SPEAKER_04I like it. Yeah, I love I love that post-recruit stocking. You know, you get them in a size when they're a hardy, more hardy fish. I also think um we can't ignore the fact that our temperatures are warming, yeah. And that that stocking line is gradually going to increase. So before the end of your career, you're gonna be talking about we can put fry largemouth in this in this body of water.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Uh that are Florida bass. I'm the same way as you. Florida bass and largemouth are the same thing. But um, you could put you could put Florida bass fry before the end of your career just because our water temperature is increasing. Now, I don't know that they'll ever gonna get to the point where Bailey can stop Florida bass uh in New York, but uh I guess never say never.
SPEAKER_00Well, he's got smallmouth, like big ones, so what does he need Florida bass for?
SPEAKER_02That's a great question.
SPEAKER_00That's a great question. It may be controversial, but aren't smallmouth better anyway?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, uh, I'll avoid that soapbox. Uh yes, uh in some cases.
SPEAKER_04Love it. That may be a topic of a full episode, or smallmouth better than Florida bass.
SPEAKER_00I like it. I like it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and the answer is a Florida bass female crossed with a male smallmouth is better.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah. Now we're getting spicy.
SPEAKER_02Give me the give me the male smallmouth on bed mentality of every fish, and every single human in society would be fishing. Right. There'll be like 17 holes in every single fish, but we're gonna have some fun.
SPEAKER_04They'll keep coming, man. They'll keep coming. All right, Bailey, what questions do you have for me?
SPEAKER_02I kind of answered a lot. I mean, what we've been going through and understanding, like I I'd found it fascinating just that not more people thought about using forward facing with the shocking. Uh, but I would love to be firsthand in the boat, seeing like the dynamic of what's I don't want to get into Steve. I'd rather go with you, Nate. Uh, but then seeing like the dynamics of the fish with the shocking and how they're interacting. That that part is because like from my perspective, all I see is how they interact with either one bait or two with the boat. But when you add in those different other elements, it'd be it'd be pretty cool to see and kind of learn from.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's it's wild to see for sure. Anytime you want to come down to Oklahoma, give me give me a call and we'll we'll go out and find some.
SPEAKER_02We'll love to do that. Anything to get me away from Steve.
SPEAKER_00There you go. This is closer to Steve, though, than New York. So maybe I ought to come up to you and you can show me smallmouth while I'm there.
SPEAKER_02We could trade. Uh it sounds like a great trade.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Perfect.
SPEAKER_00I'll leave us. Go ahead, Steve.
SPEAKER_04Leave it, leave it. Tell me what you're gonna say.
SPEAKER_00I'll leave us with one more thing. Um, is and that's just talk to your area biologist. If you have questions, if you have concerns, give us a call. We want to talk about this stuff, we want to talk about what we do. Um, don't let the uh Facebook rumors of the no live scope get you. Um, you got questions, call your local biologist. We'd love to chat.
SPEAKER_02Love it. Thank you.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, and that's that's kind of how we love to end the episodes, anyways. Um usually we end with a question of if somebody wants to volunteer, wants to participate, how do they contact you? Uh so that's perfect. Do you want um y'all y'all have social media? You have a regional website where somebody can look up their biologist. How do they find you?
SPEAKER_00Uh yeah, that's gonna be under wildlifedepartment.com. Just go to the fisheries page, and there's a fisheries contact list, and you can see everyone by region. Uh, we also have Facebook um and Instagram and TikTok, so you guys can reach out on that too.
SPEAKER_04Awesome. And I mean, I guess I I should ask, are you going to do more forward-facing with electrofishing? Or are you putting the gear down and you're going back to traditional electrofishing?
SPEAKER_00Uh I would love to do more with it. I'm not exactly sure what I'll say I'm going to do with it next, but I'm wanting to do more with it. I think there's opportunities here. I don't know that we'll be able to do our whole survey with forward-facing sonar, but maybe. I mean, I I think there's applicability and we need to have it on our every boat in the state.
SPEAKER_04I love these scopers. Scopers. Your state or scopers. How about that?
SPEAKER_00That's controversial. There's your clip art.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, there you go. Yeah. State scoper. State scoper. All right. All right, Nate, the state scoper. We'll talk to you soon, brother.
SPEAKER_00All right. Thanks, guys. Good to see you.
SPEAKER_02All right, folks. That's gonna do it for today's episode. Steve, what do we have for takeaways from this show with Nate?
SPEAKER_04Well, number one, Nate is one of those examples of a young fisheries professional who's just starting to build their legacy in the industry. Um we've got you know a 30-year career ahead of him, and we're gonna see a lot coming out of him, and that's exciting. It's a lot like you know, Ryan Gary that we had on in the past, and just some of the younger professionals that have been on that you look at and you say, if I was that talented at that age, what could I have accomplished by now? Um I'm excited by that. I'm excited by the fact that Oklahoma is leading, not following. They are making decisions on black mass management and trying to move the conversation in a different direction to improve their fisheries and using best available technology, like we mentioned. You know, that is the only way to approach it. And they're doing so right now. The krill survey is uh it's tough because you're not interviewing the exact same angler, so you don't know, am I changing their opinion over time, or is this just a cultural thing? But we do have to have a cultural conversation about the harvest of fish. It has become a recurring theme of real biology segments, is to talk about harvest. I don't know that we can make it out of any episode and not have that mentioned in some way. Which should tell you as an angler this is a constant conversation for biologists how do we correct this?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I love that. Love the incorporated use of technology and just uh not purely out of uh making things easier, but being more efficient and more accurate.
SPEAKER_04Absolutely. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So, like I said in the episode, calf jokingly, but also serious, would love to see what that looks like on the water. That'd be that'd be freaking cool.
SPEAKER_04But uh Yeah, I mean gosh, Bailey, um make it to Texas at the right time of year. Uh every time you come to Texas, your schedule is so swamped. You text me like, how's this fishery? And like you're fishing something every single day, which I get it. You're visiting Texas, you want to experience all of the great fisheries. I get it. Um, and I live a little bit west of where you like to stomp. Um, but at some point you'll make it this direction. We'll put you out on the boat, create some content, uh, show you some of the things that we talk about every week on the episodes.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Heck yeah. Dude, this was a fun one. Appreciate you and uh and your time as always, and appreciate our guests. Uh like Steve mentioned in the show, we'll have contact information as well as the websites that Nate had mentioned in the episode if you guys are looking to contact um them. If you're in Oklahoma or you're looking to visit Oklahoma, um, but uh we'll have that down below in the show notes, whether on MP3 or YouTube for you guys. But uh Steve, it was a good one, it was a fun one, man.
SPEAKER_04Always fun. Uh we've got banger after banger coming. I just I look at the schedule of future guests that we have, and I'm so excited. I'm glad we're back at it. We're on a roll. Uh we're gonna keep putting them out.
SPEAKER_02Heck yeah. Well, folks, appreciate you guys uh appreciate taking time out to listen to this whole thing. If you're still here, y'all are amazing. Appreciate you, and we'll see you on the next one. Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Grandma.
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