When angler David Watkins moved to the Columbus area in 1985, he could go anywhere on the Tombigbee River and “catch a world of bass.”
But over the years, dying vegetation and frequent flooding have left the fishery at Columbus Lake depleted.
“It’s like a mud hole because it killed off most of the vegetation, and I’m sure all the floods we had, especially that one time we had three back to back, that moves a lot of silt,” Watkins told The Dispatch. “And that silt, bass don’t like bedding in that.”
After a national Bassmasters Open came to the lake in April, Kellis Higginbotham, supervisor for the Stennis Lock and Dam, and Frances Glenn, tourism director for the Columbus-Lowndes Visitors Bureau, began talking about ways to better support the fishery.
As luck would have it, the Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries and Parks already had the lake scheduled to be restocked on Wednesday.
Higginbotham connected with MDWFP Biologist Dustin Rogers and floated the idea of bringing local anglers out to help distribute the fish throughout the lake to give them a better chance at survival.
“He said that (MDWFP) doesn’t have the resources to distribute the fish through the lake, but would be more than happy to, if we had some local anglers that were willing to do it and volunteer their time, they would load them on the boat for them,” Higginbotham told The Dispatch.
Rogers said the department has been stocking Columbus Lake with Florida bass since 2004, with Wednesday’s restock adding a little more than 100,000 fingerlings to the fishery.
“With the fish that go in today, it will put us at about 940,000 fish that we’ve stocked in just Columbus,” he said. “So this is something that’s been going on for over 20 years.”
When he reached out to gauge local anglers’ interest, Higginbotham immediately heard back from 15 fishermen who wanted to help.
It’s not uncommon for local anglers to help with restocks across the state, Rogers said. When anglers carry the fish to more optimal environments, they are more likely to make it to adulthood, he said.
“It just distributes them throughout the lake and probably gives them a chance to put them in some places where there’s a little bit of cover, maybe some vegetation for the fingerlings to kind of get in and hopefully have a higher survival rate,” he said.
State of the fishery
Rogers said several non-native, invasive plant species have threatened the lake over the last 15 years, especially water hyacinth and giant salvinia. Because the plants have the capacity to quickly overwhelm the fishery, he said the department has to spray treatments to keep the plants under control.
In turn, the spraying can cause damage to the native grasses, which create a strong spawning habitat for fish in the lake.
Likewise, development around Columbus has introduced silt into the environment, creating another issue for the fish population.
“The watershed around Columbus Lake is pretty heavily altered (with) gravel mining and that kind of thing,” Rogers said. “So yes, siltation has been an ongoing problem, and I think that was pretty well known from the creation of the Tenn Tom to be an issue.”
The issue isn’t central to Columbus. Rogers said the increased channelization of creeks and rivers in the northeast region has also played a part in erosion and sedimentation.
“So when you drive over a creek in Mississippi, and you see these steep banks on the side where it’s washed out, that’s not normal,” he said. “That shouldn’t be that way, so you’ve got all of that (water) coming in. So it’s not so much an issue with the lake. It’s the whole surrounding area.”
Rebuilding the population
Anglers began arriving at the lake Wednesday just before 10 a.m., eager to get their boats in the water. Higginbotham told The Dispatch he believes the anglers’ willingness to help is driven by their understanding of how important it is to support the fishery.
“Mississippi Fisheries and Wildlife is doing everything they can do,” he said. “… They don’t have a big budget to work with. They’re raising the fish, hatching the fish and putting them in the lakes. The anglers, we just feel like if we can get them to a better habitat, we’ll have a better survival rate, and it will be better for the City of Columbus. It will be better for the fishery.”
Anglers carried the fingerlings to specific areas. The goal, Higginbotham said, was to disperse fish where they would have access to native vegetation and clean water.
Watkins’ goal was to drop the fish in areas where the silt isn’t bad. He told The Dispatch he doesn’t expect to see the results of these efforts for at least a few years, but he hopes it helps restore the bass population.
“The weights have dropped probably over half of what you used to see normally,” he said. “They’re not there anymore, and hopefully, by restocking they can rebuild the population again.”
Periodic samplings from the lake have shown that the restocks are already making a difference, Rogers said.
“Since we’ve been stocking bass in here, we’ve seen an increase in our catch rate, in the number of fish per mile that we pick up, and also angler catch rates have gone up,” he said.
McRae is a general assignment and education reporter for The Dispatch.
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