4 million fry produced at Blackwater this spring

The staff at the Blackwater Fisheries Research and Development Center has been busy this spring producing more than 4 million fish for Florida waters.

Dave Yeager, one of the senior fisheries biologists at the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) facility near Holt, said the fish include striped bass, white bass, hybrid striped bass and largemouth bass.  The fingerlings were either stocked in Panhandle waters or taken to the Florida Bass Conservation Center in Webster or the Welaka National Fish Hatchery in Palatka.

“In the past when we produced hybrid striped bass we collected wild white bass and stripers from our rivers or lakes, but this past year we held both species in tanks at our facility,” Yeager said.  “Maintaining the fish on site saved us significant time and effort.”

He said the high-tech method of producing stripers in the past involved injecting female fish with human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) hormone to stimulate egg development and spawning.  When striper eggs are very early in the developmental stage, Yeager said, HCG doesn’t work well.

In its place, he said, Blackwater staff developed a new hormone technique. Using the new technique this spring they produced more than 1 million striper fry.

In an effort to measure stocking success, Yeager said, striped bass and white bass fingerlings stocked in the Ochlockonee River and lakes Talquin and Seminole were marked with a dye that produces a yellow mark in the bones of fish.  By marking the stocked fingerlings, biologists should be able to determine to what extent hatchery-produced fish contribute to the population, versus natural reproduction.

Although the emphasis was mostly on species other than largemouth bass, Yeager said the hatchery produced and stocked 35,000 fingerling largemouth bass in Lake Talquin.  All of the bass are tagged with small, metal micro-tags. He said the micro-tags will be useful in the future for looking at survival rates.