One thing you will never find is a bass angler who is happy with catching medium-sized fish. It is always bigger is better. That has been the strategy for the Alabama Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries (WFF) Division for decades.
One method to achieve a larger bass is to introduce different genetic traits into the population. That was what occurred recently when Lake Jordan received its final stocking of Florida bass fingerlings.
The WFF’s Fisheries Section took the bulk of the Florida bass production from the Marion and Eastaboga hatcheries and stocked the fingerlings into Lake Jordan, a Coosa River impoundment.
“This is the third year where we have undertaken a concentrated stocking of Florida bass in Jordan,” said Fisheries Chief Nick Nichols. “Those stockings took place in the Bouldin impoundment. Those three years of stockings at Jordan is just a continuation of a stocking strategy that has gone on since the early 1990s.”
That strategy is to stock as many bass as the hatcheries can produce in a given time frame into a single area of a single reservoir.
“The goal of that is not to increase the number of largemouth bass in the lake,” Nichols said. “It’s simply an effort to introduce Florida bass genetic material into that lake’s native bass population. We’ve been doing this in reservoirs since the 1990s.
“We first attempted this at Lake Guntersville. We stocked Florida bass in two or three distinct locations in the lake. Guntersville had what we consider a true northern bass population. It’s on the Tennessee River above the shoals. Even though we stocked fewer fish at Guntersville during that time, the stocking of Florida bass on top of the native northern bass was actually more effective. We were introducing a different
