"With the northern bass, we can go out in the wild and get broodstock," Dennis explained. "But with the Floridas, we've got to keep them on station (in hatchery ponds), and all of our fish get genetically tested every year to make sure we maintain pure Florida bass. And then there's feeding those rascals all year!"

Dennis, like many biologists and anglers, believes they're harder to catch. Because Floridas grow aggressively, you'd assume they eat the same way, but they're wallflowers at nature's buffet compared to northern bass. For example, Texas researchers repeatedly caught captive, northern largemouths on a specific lure, but in a nearby pond, Floridas quickly learned to ignore it. Texas hatchery workers also observed that adding forage fish to holding tanks full of northern bass caused feeding sprees that ended only when the last baitfish was gone. Under the same conditions, Florida bass took three days to finish off the baitfish.

"In some cases, (fisheries managers in Texas) are reverting back to northerns because of angler complaints that Floridas are harder to catch," Dennis said. "Being a little harder to catch may be one of the tradeoffs that allows them to get older and grow bigger." So far, no one in Arkansas has complained about adding Florida bass to the mix.

THE DEGRAY EXPERIMENT
The AGFC's boldest Florida bass action to date is the eight-year plan for stocking part of Lake DeGray. The project began in June 2006 with more than 170,000 Florida fingerlings, and the AGFC intends to stock the 900-acre Brushy Creek arm with at least 90,000 Florida bass per year until at least 2013.

Deep, clear, and rocky reservoirs such as DeGray are the antithesis of the shallow, fertile and highly vegetated lakes where Floridas thrive.

"However, some of the research shows you can possibly impact a larger system like our highland reservoirs if you stock a creek arm that's really productive and has good habitat," Dennis said. "Instead of stocking the whole lake, you stock that one arm heavily to impact it with the Florida genes, and they'll eventually spread throughout the lake."

DeGray was chosen for this experiment because it's the Corps' smallest and southernmost Arkansas reservoir and features ample aquatic vegetation.

"It's going to take two or three years for them to reproduce, and then another couple of years before we can follow those offspring with genetics work," Dennis said. "It'll take at least eight years before we can tell whether we're making a difference." Annual follow up studies will compare samples from the stocked area and throughout the lake with the genes of pre-stocking samples.

HARVESTING FLORIDAS
It may sound counter-intuitive at first, but harvesting Florida-strain bass is an important part of building trophy fisheries.