Photo by Ron Sinfelt

Like finned tigers, West Virginia’s hybrid striped bass prowl the state’s large waterways in search of prey. Sometimes they find it. Often it’s some unfortunate shad or skipjack herring that wasn’t quick enough to escape. But sometimes it’s a lure or a piece of bait -- and when it is, the angler at the other end of the line learns just what a tiger this stripe-sided denizen of the deep can be.

“Our hybrids are extremely strong, extremely hard-fighting fish,” said Bret Preston, fisheries chief for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources (DNR). “That’s one of their great appeals, and that’s why they’ve been so popular with fishermen ever since we began stocking them.”

Encouraged by water-quality improvements brought about by the Clean Water Act of 1972, DNR officials began looking for ways to improve the state’s big-river fisheries. For a while, they tried stocking full-blooded striped bass, but the stockings wouldn’t take.

“True stripers never would stay in the rivers,” Preston explained. “They always seemed to migrate upstream or downstream from where they were stocked.”

To fill the ecological niche, biologists turned to the hybrid, a striper and white bass cross that had been introduced successfully in other states. “We found that hybrids were less migratory, they grow faster, and they could more easily adapt to changes in water quality. In other words, they had several advantages that true stripers didn’t have,” Preston said.

“Because they don’t reproduce, we’re easily able to control their numbers. When we stock them, we know for sure that the population is never going to get out of control.”

Introduced to Mountain State waters in the late 1970s, hybrid stripers quickly filled an empty ecological niche in the state’s largest waters.

“After navigation dams were built on these rivers, native populations of walleyes and other open-water fish really suffered. With fewer large predatory fish there to feed on them, populations of gizzard shad exploded,” Preston recalled.

The stocked hybrids took over the role the walleyes left open. They tore into the vast schools of gizzard shad that queued up downstream of the navigation dams. They grew large in a hurry. Fishermen started hooking them. The word spread quickly.

“It didn’t take long for hybrids to become extremely popular with anglers. They put up a great fight, they are a lot of fun to catch, and they are pretty good-sized. People like that package,” Preston said.

Since then, the number of hybrids stocked each year has fluctuated, mainly because they’re difficult to grow in hatcheries. In years when the weather cooperates and hatchery workers are able to get a good crop of zooplankton going, DNR crews might stock as many as 1 million fingerlings. A few cloudy days during the plankton-growing period can knock the total back to 200,000 or so.

“We had some very good years early on, when we were raising all our hybrids at the Palestine Hatchery. They tend to do well in the earthen-bottomed ponds there. After we split production between Palestine and the Apple Grove facility, our production tailed off a little. The plastic-lined ponds at Apple Grove don’t grow hybrids very well unless we’re lucky enough to get a really good plankton crop in them,” the biologist said.