Florida bass: the Importance of Genetics
We talk a lot about genetics. You can manage your lake or pond every way to Sunday, but if your genetics are poor, so will be your fish. The easiest way I can illustrate the importance of genetics is this: a starving St. Bernard will still dwarf a well-fed dachsund, because its genetic code causes it to grow on a different scale. They’re both dogs; but their DNA is vastly different. Even within different individuals of the same species, genetics can make a world of difference; if they didn’t, there would be no such thing as purebred dogs selling for thousands of dollars each. Those high-dollar dogs will have characteristics you just won’t find in a dog you pick up at the humane shelter.
The genetics of our Florida bass come from a few different sources: two farms in Texas known for the quality of their pure Florida bass, and multiple lakes in Florida renowned for their trophy bass. One of the two farms in Texas we have gotten bass from is world-famous for how big their pure Florida bass get; they have had male Floridas reach ten pounds in size, which is unheard of for a male. Most of our fish that came directly from Florida came from Lake Talquin, a lake known nationwide as one of the best in Florida for trophy bass; this lake has received numerous stockings of Florida bass from the Florida Wildlife Commission; our guide on the lake tells us he has seen a bass in the lake that he believes would have gone twenty pounds.
We travel to Florida multiple times every year to catch more Florida bass, hand-painted bluegill, coppernose bluegill, and Florida redear from the wild to introduce fresh genetics to the fish at our hatchery. Last year we brought back 35 Florida bass from two days of fishing Lake Talquin. All six of the fish in this video went from seven to ten pounds each; according to our guide for the trip, the two biggest ones were ten-pounders (we didn’t weigh them because we were trying to minimize handling of them). All of these fish were caught on lures:
Remember that starving St. Bernard analogy I made? I actually have a firsthand example of this playing out with bass genetics. Anyone who spawns Florida or largemouth bass will have procedures in place to separate the young-of-year bass from the adult spawners; some folks do this at the egg stage, by having the bass lay their eggs on synthetic spawning mats and then transferring the mats to nursery ponds with no adult bass in them; some people do it by netting schools of just-hatched fry and moving them to another pond. Last year, we moved fertilized eggs to mats in nursery ponds; a few weeks after a cohort of mats was introduced to a nursery pond, we would seine it to capture the fingerlings to sell.
One of the ponds we seined in June 2024 only had a handful of bass in it - but they were all six to seven inches long, and fat as footballs. They had unfortunately eaten most of their brothers and sisters and cousins that hatched out with them. There were no minnows or other forage items in this pond; nursery ponds are fertilized to promote zooplankton growth, as that’s what the fry eat whenhey first hatch, and by the time they get big enough to start eating fish, we harvest them to stock into customers’ ponds. These bass had been moved as eggs in mid-April, meaning they weren’t even a fish until near the end of April; they grew from a half-inch fry to six and seven inches long in two months’ time.
We moved that handful of fast-growing cannibals to another pond where our broodstock bass live after the spawning season, so they will be among the bass we spawn this year. But one of those fast-growing bass jumped the seine that day, and got away.
In September, we drained that pond down to prepare it for nursery use again in 2025. From June to September, no minnows or any other kind of forage was added to that pond, and it wasn’t fed; we had forgotten about the fish that jumped the seine, and had not been providing any sort of nourishment for it. We seined the pond upon draining it down the first week of September, and found that fish and three other bass; all of them were eight to nine inches long apiece. And they had had nothing to eat for months other than a few tadpoles. (It would not have been a good life strategy to be a bug that fell into that pond in that time frame.)
We moved those four bass to a broodstock pond with lots of bluegill and other forage fish. Needless to say, they won’t still be just eight or nine inches long when we seine a couple weeks from now to move them to spawning ponds.
Florida bass are known for growing slower the first year to year-and-a-half of life than northern or F1 bass, then outpacing those other bass while also living longer, and therefore ultimately getting significantly bigger than the other two varieties. You could buy a lot of pure Florida bass fry from a lot of farms and put them in ponds with heavy densities of forage and not have many of those fish grow from a half-inch to nine inches in five months. Now take that one step further and try growing any bass, Florida or otherwise, to that length in five months, when half that time there’s nothing in the pond for the bass to eat.
That’s the power of genetics.
If you don’t just want pretty good bass fishing, if you don’t just want to catch decently big bass but bigger than any other private lake or pond owner you know, bigger potentially - with the proper management - than any angler has ever caught in this state, there’s only one company to call to stock and manage your water, and that’s us.
These are record-caliber fish. And we know how to get them that big once they’re in the lake or pond. Our competitors will tell you they know, but they’re still using the same methods that were used twenty years ago. They’re playing checkers and we moved on to chess a while back.
