When Will Eads of Winston-Salem, NC, felt a bass grab his jerkbait during a March 1 tournament on his home waters, Salem Lake, he didn’t think it would be an especially special fish.
When he got it in the boat and took a good look, he realized it was both good and bad: it was a solid keeper – his first of the day – but it looked a lot like an Alabama spotted bass, which wasn’t supposed to be in the 365-acre municipal lake that is rated among North Carolina’s best bass fisheries.
“I knew that was not good,” said Eads, who looked inside the fish’s mouth and found the distinctive tooth patch on the fish’s tongue, in addition to the usual markings on the fish’s sides below its lateral line, and its short jaw line.
At the weigh-in, Eads turned the fish over to Salem Lake officials. Their initial reaction involved an unprintable word. They also identified it as an Alabama spot, took it back to the marina office, and dropped it in a display aquarium before calling biologists with the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission to have the fish examined and document another potential fisheries disaster. When Kin Hodges, the Commission’s district fisheries biologist for northwest North Carolina got the call, Salem Lake officials said his immediate reaction was, “Nooooooooooo!!!!!”
Don’t do it
At the same time, on a wall outside the office door at Salem Lake, hung a poster displaying the identifying characteristics of largemouth bass and Alabama spotted bass and requesting that fishermen not introduce any Alabama spots into any body of water in North Carolina – a violation punishable by a fine.
Somebody must not be a very good reader.
The Alabama spotted bass, Micropterus henshalli, has been causing all kinds of problems around the Carolinas for about 20 years. Native to the Coosa River system that flows from northern Georgia into Alabama, the Alabama spot is a close cousin to the popular Kentucky spotted bass, a chunky, smaller cousin of largemouths and smallmouths that is much desired as a battling sportfish. But the Kentucky spot isn’t a threat. The Alabama is a threat to almost any bass fishery where it shows up – and it usually shows up in the livewells of bass boats, toted there by fishermen who want the hard-fighting fish to enliven their home waters.
Almost everywhere Alabama spots show up, that body of water’s black bass fishery suffers. They outcompete largemouth and smallmouth for food and spawning areas; they aggressively inbreed with both species and can, in a matter of 6 or 7 years, take over a fishery.
First reported in 1983 in Lake Chatuge along the North Carolina-Georgia border near Hayesville, NC, Alabama bass took over. In 1983, smallmouths made up 70 percent of the black bass population in the 7000-acre mountain lake. By 1997, the state of Georgia reported that Chatuge was totally devoid of smallmouth, and Alabamas made up 88% of the lake’s black bass population.
Population crisis
The problem? Once they’ve taken over a lake, Alabamas will overpopulate and show stunted growth patterns. Although some will reach 4 pounds, the huge, overriding majority will be 12- to 14-inch fish – far inferior to the largemouth and smallmouth they have pushed out.
Several years ago, to combat the Alabamas’ arrival, North Carolina changed its regulations and eliminated any daily creel limit or size minimum on spots, hoping fishermen would keep and take home as many as they could carry. It turns out, they’ve just carried them to other lakes.
“We realize there’s no way to completely eliminate Alabama bass once they get established, so the goal is to keep their numbers as low as possible to minimize their impact,” Hodges said.
Genetic analysis indicates that the spots in most North Carolina lakes now came from Georgia’s Lake Lanier. They arrived in Lake Norman in the early 1990s and now make up 90 percent of that lake’s black bass. They have shown up in Mountain Island Lake and Lake Wylie, downstream from Norman on the Catawba River. They have overtaken largemouth populations in Belews Lake north of Winston-Salem and Greensboro, and have overrun Moss Lake, a municipal lake in Cleveland County between Shelby and Kings Mountain.
They showed up in Lake Gaston, a noted bass fishery on the Roanoke River that straddles the North Carolina-Virginia line, in 2012. By 2022, they made up 55 percent of the black bass population. In the wonderful section of the Broad River in Cleveland County, a great smallmouth fishery, Alabamas have shown up, and the smallmouth are in serious decline.
Corey Oakley, assistant chief of sport fish management for NCWRC, said they’re even more efficient at moving smallmouth bass out of the picture. They readily interbreed, initially producing aggressive, fast-growing hybrids of the two species, but very quickly eliminating any pure smallmouth left.
It’s a big problem
They are taking over in Fontana Lake in the extreme southwestern corner of North Carolina, making up 75 percent of the black bass population 12 years after first being discovered.
“In 10 years, smallmouth bass won’t exist there,” Oakley said.
They’ve been in Lake James for 8 or 9 years and Oakley expects smallmouths to disappear over the next 20 years – the same with Glenville Lake.
“To keep them on the landscape, we’ll have to stock smallmouth bass in perpetuity,” Oakley said. “We’ve got to get people to stop moving them; that’s a master of education. We can’t police that. It takes anglers understanding they might be doing more detrimental things when they move fish than positives. They outcompete largemouths and interbreed with smallmouths. Eventually, there will be no pure smallmouth left.
“We will have to make some very difficult decisions when it comes to largemouth and smallmouth bass. In reservoirs with largemouth, it takes 10 to 15 years for Alabama bass to replace them; in smallmouth lakes, it’s about 20. And we only have so much water (in hatcheries) to grow fish.”
Jason Bettinger, the fisheries coordinator for the SC Dept. of Natural Resources, has been quoted as saying that Alabamas have taken over in Lake Greenwood over the past 20 years, and they’ve been caught from the Saluda River downstream from Greenwood, meaning that Lake Murray is likely their next destination, having already overwhelmed Lake Keowee, and taking a foothold in all three Savannah River reservoirs: Hartwell, Russell and Clarks Hill.
There are lakes where Alabamas and largemouth bass can co-exist. According to North Carolina’s Hodges, Alabamas have a more difficult time getting a foothold in, or replacing largemouths, in very fertile reservoirs often marked by more stained water. Who knows? Maybe they aren’t as effective at finding bedding largemouth in dirty water and adding their genetic material to the nests.
Largemouths can hold out against Alabamas in some areas of lakes that are more fertile than others, or that usually hold more stained water. But in deep, clear lakes, Alabamas are usually tough to stop once they get moving – like Derrick Henry was when he played running back for famed Alabama coach Nick Saban.
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