Bass fishermen who frequent Lake Norman’s 32,500 acres in North Carolina’s Foothills might notice something a little different about the largemouth bass they catch a few years down the road.
They might be bigger.
The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission has decided to do an experimental stocking this fall with F-1 largemouths, a first-generation cross between northern bass and Florida-strain largemouth known for reaching larger sizes with fast growth rates.
The Commission met with a group of fishermen from the Lake Norman area earlier this year; the anglers asked the agency to try something to help the fishery, which is now made up of approximately 80% Alabama spotted bass and 20% largemouths.
“We listened to them, watched what other states are doing, looked at the state of the fishery at Norman, and we decided to introduce 2,000 of the F-1 bass this fall,” said Lawrence Dorsey of Albemarle, a fisheries biologist with the Commission. “We’re going to stock advanced-sized fish, 6 to 9 inches. The fishermen are going to raise the funding, and we’re going to arrange to get the fish from a commercial producer. We will get them and mark them with a coded wire tag in the cheek that won’t be visible, and when we electroshock fish in the spring, we’ll be able to identify these fish by running them under a metal detector.
“This is a limited evaluation for Lake Norman. The 2,000 fish is a starting point; we’ll see how it goes from there,” Dorsey said. “From our perspective, we don’t have any indication that these fish will displace Alabamas in Norman. We just want to know, will we see some individuals pop up larger than the lake has been producing? Those would be the F-1s.”
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