Rockfish!

the rockfish has to be punished about the matter created quite a splash in tennessee the man who is most responsible for this fact is dave bishop a fisheries biologist who works from the game and fish commission's knoxville office he has played nurse made to the rock fish young and old for some time now dave just why do we want the rock fish in tennessee well for two reasons really anson first of all it's a an unusual game fish that reaches a size of which no other game fish in tennessee attains secondly we need the fish to control the vast numbers of gizzard sheds that we have in the reservoirs in this state now i've heard i've talked to a lot of people and i mentioned the rock fish and they say you mean the rock bass now we're not talking about the same fish here no the rock fish is essentially a saltwater striped bass uh it's famous all along the atlantic coast for surf casters who catch the fish there and weights up to 75 pounds it was originally believed that the fish had to spend part of its time in salt water but recently through an accident down in south carolina it was found that the fish could live and reproduce and spend its entire life cycle in fresh water is the rockfish found pretty much throughout tennessee yet well we have the rock fish in several of our waters now we don't have any uh real significant populations in any of the reservoirs in a fishable manner we do have a lot of young fish coming on but for the older fish we are limited to just a few of the eastern reservoirs primarily how much do we expect of the rock fish size wise as a sport fish well the freshwater record for the rock fish set down in santee cooper reservoir in south carolina is 53 pounds presently our fish are growing faster than the young fish do down there whether or not we'll be able to beat this record we don't know but we do expect fish that top 30 and 40 pounds effective the first of january i believe it is dave there will be a size limitation on the rockfish specifically they must be at least 15 inches before they can be legally taken from the water what's the reason for this well since we're trying to establish a new type of fishing primarily that of a larger game fish we feel that it's just uneconomical to have the rockfish taken at a smaller size than 15 inches and secondly since we're trying to control the gizzard shed populations the only way a fish can do this is by feeding on the adult gizzard shad and the rockfish has to reach a length of 15 inches before it's capable of doing it now this seems to me like dave that it might present some problems for the angler the rockfish looks considerably like a fish that we're all familiar with the white bass or the stripe as some people call it how can one go about telling the difference between the two fish and we have a poster here to help you show us the major differences in these two fish well basically there are two differences that the fisherman should look for first of all is the difference in the body shape of the two fish and secondly the pattern of the stripes or lines on the side now if you compare two fish of equal length you would find that the white bass or stripe as it's called in our waters is much deeper and shaped similar to a crappie the rockfish on the other hand is a long streamlined shape that doesn't have the hump on the back you might say he's a sort of torpedo shaped that's right shaped similar to our largemouth bass uh the line patterns on the side as we pointed out we have some fish here taken from one of our eastern reservoirs this is a rock fish the stripes as you can see are very dark almost black on the sides they're extremely prominent they extend all the way to the tail they could be broken or unbroken as the case may be on this particular fish they're broken quite a bit above the lateral line this is a pretty good size fish dave about how old is he well this fish will be three years old in april three years it weighs about five and a half pounds so you can see they do grow rather rapidly good growth rate yes now the white bass or stripe as we have here you can see the lines are are practically obscure on the sides they're very faint in comparison to those of the rock fish and you can also see the difference in the body shape here in comparison to the body width now there's a third fish here dave that we have for display and i recognize it as being what we call the hybrid it's sort of a cross between these two where did it come from well when we first began began to work with the rock fish we had some bad luck and we're not raising the number of rock fish that we wanted to stock in our reservoirs so we crossed the rock fish with our stripe and since they were cousins it did work out pretty well and we have a hybrid uh in the eastern reservoirs now that is reaching weights up to 10 pounds at slightly less than four years of age now there could be some confusion between this fish and both his quote parents how do you tell the difference well this is true there is a a lot of room for confusion here on these two fish but the hybrid has the dark heavy lines of the rock fish the it has much less of a hump on the back than the stripe does it uh has seven stripes on the side like the rock fish whereas the stripe of white bass has about eight to ten and also the stripes on the tail of the white bass usually fade out before they get all the way to the tail whereas on the other two fish they do not now i'm sure there are some other minor differences in the two fish and the game and fish commission will be putting out some posters and other educational aids along this line so that we perhaps can eliminate quite a bit of this confusion in the three fish