Powered
<p>This is a topic that may interest some of you as much as it did me. The Texas parks and wildlife department has been stocking non-native fish is their lakes since the 80's. After doing some research I have found that all of the following fish were stocked in lakes throughout west/south Texas(predominately near San Antonio, Waco, and San Angelo).</p>
<p>Tarpon, Walleye, Tiger Muskie, Musky, Spotted Seatrout, Red Drum, Nile Perch, Orangemouth Corvina, and Peacock Bass</p>
<p>This absolutely blows my mind! For those who don't know these Reservoirs in Texas are 300+ miles away from the saltwater and it absolutely blows my mind that Speckled trout, Corvina, Redfish, etc. were all caught that far away from the Gulf. I'm not sure if this is as much of a shock to some as it is to me, but I figured I would share what I learned with the forum and see what others though. </p>
Didn't know about the tarpon, and I don't know if most of them were able to get established, but I've read about this before.
Let there be fire!
Back in the day, many states (including Connecticut) took the shotgun approach of stocking whatever they could get their hands on to see if anything would "take". Most of this happened before the 1970s. Of course, the majority of these experiments were failures.
Obviously, some experiments - for better or for worse - worked. For example, Common Carp and Brown Trout were first stocked in the late 1800s.
Between the 1970s and early 80s or thereabouts, people started getting more sensitive about potential ecological consequences of stocking non-natives. Around the same time, many warmwater hatcheries closed and management emphasis of warmwater fisheries shifted more to regulations instead of stocking.
Obviously, there's still a lot of stocking of warmwater fish nowadays, but it's typically limited to those animals that have proven to be cost effective on a put-grow-and-catch basis.
Nile perch? In Texas?
Are they still stocking all this stuff?
SomewhereDownstream
Red drum and walleye are still stocked but nile perch died out do to cold texas winter