Can Shoal Bass Still Be Found Here? | A Chattahoochee Mystery

For years, anglers and biologists watched shoal bass slowly disappear from this historic pool of the Chattahoochee River.

What made the decline so strange was that there was no obvious reason why it was happening.

This section of river has certainly been altered over the last 150 years, but most major changes occurred long ago. In fact, water quality here has likely improved over the last few decades. Yet throughout the 2010s, shoal bass numbers continued to fall.

During a two-year fisheries study connected to downstream dam removals, this area was supposed to serve as a control site because the removals should not have affected habitat this far upstream. But almost no shoal bass were collected here during the study. At the same time, shoal bass also disappeared from the downstream dam removal reaches.

Many anglers blamed the dam removals, but that theory never fully explained what was happening upriver in this pool.

Then something interesting happened.

Near the end of the 2010s, a few social media posts started appearing from anglers fishing this area who occasionally caught shoal bass again. Rarely, but enough to raise questions. Yet even a Georgia DNR sampling effort a few years ago reportedly failed to collect any shoal bass here.

So today, I return with one goal:

Can I find a single shoal bass in this historic stretch of river?

Along the way, we’ll discuss what this decline may mean for native black bass conservation throughout the Chattahoochee Basin and why these disappearing populations matter far beyond one fishing trip.

Subscribe to get more fishing, science, and conservation black bass content!

Follow along to see the rest of the series:
Part 1 - https://youtube.com/shorts/7ZlH7PAbfwU

#shoalbass
#chattahoocheeriver
#bassfishing
#nativebass
#blackbass
#riverfishing
#fishinghistory
#conservation
#blackbassfishing

Видео Can Shoal Bass Still Be Found Here? | A Chattahoochee Mystery канала Black Bass Talk