Sport Fish Restoration-funded research informs fishery managers.
Form follows function for a fusiform shoal bass, and its common and scientific name are most fitting. This little-known member of the black bass family, kin to the familiar largemouth bass and smallmouth bass, is found only in Georgia, Florida, and a small segment of Alabama in the Apalachicola River basin. Scientists know it as Micropterus cataractae and that says it all. It’s a bass most at home in the eddies around frothy falling rocky rapids, or shoals.
Recent scientific work at the Alabama Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit at Auburn University, funded by Sport Fish Restoration dollars—paid by manufacturers of fishing tackle and a tax on motorboat fuel—turned up new data that inform fishery managers concerned about the endemic bass. A master’s student, Jamie Leigh Rogers, supervised by co-op unit leader, Dr. Shannon Brewer, implanted shoal bass and largemouth bass with radio transmitters from five sites over a 59-mile reach of Georgia’s Flint River, and charted their movements. The two species naturally occur together. Rogers completed her thesis and degree in May 2024.
Rogers, assisted by Travis Ingram with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, anesthetized and surgically implanted thumb-sized radio transmitters in the body cavity of shoal bass and largemouth bass, with a trailing small single-wire antennae protruding from their bellies. Bass weighing more than 14 ounces or more received a radio tag. Tagged shoal bass ranged from 14 to 21 inches long, and largemouth bass from 12 to 23 inches long. Rodgers and assistants from Auburn University tracked the fish through the seasons for 15 months and learned more about the habits and habitats used by the two river-dwelling species sought after by ardent anglers. In 33 excursions to the Flint River over those months, she located 37 shoal bass 765 times and 35 largemouth bass 685 times from watercraft. The data provide a robust look at when and where and how far the fish move.
Some bass moved great distances and others, not so much. Shoal bass moved an average of 820 feet per day, but some were nearly sedentary while other individuals moved nearly 10 miles in one day. Some individual fish made multiple long-distance runs. Largemouth bass moved less, an average of 633 feet per day and up to 5.5 miles in one day. Movements of both species was the least in autumn and greatest in spring during the spawning period. Rogers found both species aggregated at dams prohibiting movement—and at spawning sites. Shoal bass spawning aggregations were denser signifying their narrower, more restrictive spawning habitat needs.
Shoal bass aggregating at barriers or over sparse spawning habitat makes then more susceptible to anglers, and potentially, an unsustainable depletion by over-fishing, concluded Rogers. Her work informs fisheries managers in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia—that brief seasonal closures or modified daily creel limits may ensure that anglers continue enjoy tussling with pugnacious shoal bass that spend their days looking into the current waiting for fish, bugs, crayfish—or an angler’s offering—to come their way.
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