Lake Management Williamson County: Is Basic Knowledge of Fish Genetics Important?

Imagine you’re in the process of hiring a lawyer, to take someone in Tennessee to court. You’re talking with this lawyer, and he mentions that he knows a great judge in Kansas who specializes in this sort of case, and recommends you file the suit in Kansas.

Would you even spend another thirty seconds talking with that lawyer? Or more likely, would you tell him you appreciated his time and simply end the call? At that point, it’s obvious that lawyer lacks the most fundamental, basic understanding of not one but many principles of law in this country: jurisdiction, the fact one can’t choose one’s judge, etc. You would probably wonder how that lawyer ever passed the bar, or how he had ever made a dime in the profession.

Or imagine you’re interviewing doctors to help you figure out a digestive issue you’ve been having, and one doctor says he can fix you right up with a combination of leeches and cocaine. You would likely not make an appointment with that doctor; you would also likely wonder how he had been able to secure a medical license.

One of our competitors currently has a blog post on their website exhorting private lake and pond owners not to put too much emphasis on genetics in largemouth bass management. They make a perfunctory nod to the importance of genetics, and then proceed to argue that genetics are often over-emphasized, and are not as crucial as some make them out to be.

They give a specific example of a large private lake that produced very big bass for a few years, and then began to decline as the owner stopped spending money on the lake. So far, so good: I am always quick to tell people that if they do everything right for a year or two or three and then stop all management, the lake will decline.

My beef with the article comes with the vast, almost incomprehensible lack of understanding of basic fish genetics that is demonstrated in some of the statements made. At one point, the writer states that the same genetics that were stocked into the lake several years prior, are the genetics present in the lake now that the fish have become stunted from neglect.

There are many specifics about lake and pond management that I don’t delve into in blog posts, simply because I feel that I have figured out some things about bass and bluegill biology that none of my competitors have, and if I share those insights on here, they will have the same knowledge I have, and will be able to come closer to duplicating my results. Some of these observations that I don’t broadcast, came from years both of extensive reading in fisheries research, and many years of trial and error in the field, observing what works and what doesn’t, what happens with a fish population under “x” scenario, what happens under “z” scenario, etc. Then there are things that should be obvious to anyone who has ever studied fish for five minutes, but somehow have escaped many or most of my competitors.

When a degreed fisheries biologist states that the same genetics that were stocked into a lake eight or ten years earlier are the genetics that are present in that lake now, he is evincing the same level of understanding of fish genetics as would a lawyer suggesting a court case can be filed in a state with no connection to the issue at hand, as would a doctor suggesting medieval cures in the twenty-first century.

I’m avoiding specifics because I don’t want to educate my competitor, who already outranks me on Google, though they are headquartered in another state and don’t even have a biologist assigned to this state, because they’re a large corporation and can outspend me on SEO. Suffice it to say that anyone who has ever taken even a ten-minute course in aquaculture would have learned in the first five minutes of said course the principle of genetics that applies in this instance, that is the most obvious. But there are not one but multiple very basic principles of genetics that apply here. The second-most-obvious principle is not quite as leech-level basic as the first, but anyone who reads even occasionally in fisheries research and has not been in a coma in a cave for the last twenty years would be aware of it. And the biologist who wrote this article, who is the chief biologist for this corporation with offices in dozens of states, clearly is completely oblivious to both of the principles I’m alluding to.

One would think that surely at least one of the dozens of fisheries biologists who work for that corporation would have taken an aquaculture class at some point, and that there might be at least a small chance that that person might have noticed this article written by his boss, and discreetly filled him in on how preposterously ignorant it is on the most basic principles of fish genetics; not so. The article even includes a chart to make more official and scientific-looking this abominable depth of duncehood.

Bass spawn. The article makes clear that both sexes of bass were present in the lake, and had produced multiple generations of offspring. Just as a short man and a short woman can produce a tall child and vice-versa, just as a healthy man and a healthy woman can give birth to a child that has a disease, so can fish. There are multiple other very basic principles at play in this scenario, such as the two I allude to earlier in this post; I discuss them regularly with my clients. Anyone who has a degree in biology of any kind, whether it be fisheries science or any other biology degree, should know these principles; but they have clearly escaped the biologist in question.

This same article appeared in a well-known magazine.

Word to the wise: not all of the people in lake management who claim to be experts, are indeed so.