Beware Northern Companies that Will Say Anything to Get Your Money
We get a few calls every year now from pond or lake owners well north of here. We have had several pond owners from Indiana contact us; southern Indiana is closer to us than the tri-cities in east Tennessee, so I don’t feel bad about selling them fish. Several years ago a landowner with a new 2.5-acre pond in central Missouri called us wanting to stock some of our handpainted bluegill; I wasn’t sure they would thrive, but I thought they would, so I sold him the fish. He drove here with a large cooler and a special aeration rig with a small oxygen tank that I told him how to rig up, and the fish made it to his pond in great shape, and he now has monster handpainted bluegill in his pond. But I didn’t contact him - he contacted me. We have never advertised for even five minutes in any state two states away from us, north or south; I would love to work on more ponds and lakes in Florida, since we raise mostly Florida species of fish, and we have stocked a couple ponds there, but we don’t get a lot of calls from that far away, and we don’t advertise there. Florida fish will not do as well in Michigan or Ohio as they do here, and the handful of times a pond owner from that far north has asked about stocking our fish, I have told him as much. I’ll never claim to be a perfect person, but I am a born-again Christian, and I take seriously what the Bible says about loving my neighbor as myself, and I take seriously what it says about lying to others. So I will never sell you any fish or product that might harm your pond, or that might give you less of a pond than what you’re contacting me hoping to get.
I have made other blog posts on this topic, but I’m posting about it again because there are still lake and pond management companies working in this state, and working on a lot of ponds, that care no more about integrity or the best possible outcome for your pond than they do establishing a bullfrog colony on the moon. At least one of them claims on their website to be the leader in lake management in this area; they are no more the leader in lake management than Wal-Mart is the leader in medical science. Wal-Mart sells a lot of prescriptions, probably more than most if not all other companies; if you were seriously ill, would you ask a Wal-Mart pharmacist to diagnose you? The company referenced above that claims to be the leader, to their credit, has tried more than once to buy my company, likely because they recognize that they don’t have the expertise they’re claiming. A couple years ago, a bluegill hybrid that they sell and that we don’t raise and never have, suddenly showed up in four ponds at our hatchery, all at once; we now have a high-end surveillance system. If you’re spending your money with that company from two states north of us, this is who they are.
We don’t try to sell our fish in Michigan or Ohio or Illinois because they probably won’t do as well as fish adapted to those climates. So what about fish raised in a hatchery multiple states north of here? Are those fish going to do as well in your Tennessee pond in the middle of July as fish that hatched and were raised here in middle Tennessee? They won’t.
Multiple studies have found coppernose bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus purpurescens or Lepomis macrochirus mystacalis) to outgrow northern bluegill (Lepomis macrochirus macrochirus) in warm climates; there are folks who have never raised or stocked coppernose telling people online that they won’t do well in Tennessee, but coppernose are thriving in ponds as far north as Kansas (we didn’t stock them there, but know of a pond owner there who has had them for several years, and they outgrow his northern bluegill); we have stocked them as far north as Indiana, and only stocked them there because the landowner insisted on them because his neighbor had had them for several years and they were getting big. Likewise, Florida bass (Micropterus salmoides) significantly outgrow largemouth bass (Micropterus nigricans), sometimes referred to as northern largemouth, in our climate (there are people, again, claiming that Floridas don’t do well north of I-40, and yet the state record largemouth for Virginia, and the second- and third-biggest largemouth for that state, all came from lakes that were stocked with Florida bass). Lake Chickamauga near Chattanooga has been stocked with pure Florida bass since 2000 by TWRA, and in 2015 a new state record of fifteen pounds two ounces was caught from the lake. Florida bass and Florida bluegill get bigger than northern bass and bluegill in our climate; in a properly-managed pond, their superior genetics make a bigger difference than any other single thing a pond owner can do when it comes to having the biggest possible fish.
But of course the average pond owner doesn’t care about catching big fish - he prefers catching small fish so he can give his children or friends that he lets fish the valuable lesson of dealing with life’s little disappointments.
Who stocks a pond hoping to catch small fish? Who calls a hatchery hoping to buy fish that will struggle with his climate because they were hatched and raised in a different one?
There are multiple states north of Kentucky, the furthest-north state we work and advertise in, that have populations far exceeding that of Tennessee; we could probably make a fair number of sales in a year if we advertised there. But we don’t because my conscience won’t let me take people’s money for something I know isn’t the best possible option for their water. If you’re paying one of those companies from up north to bring you their fish, you’re giving money to people who will say anything to get a sale, and who care more about their bottom line than the success of your pond.
