Game Over 
Bass-O-Matic
How a radical plan for breeding huge fish transformed one of the most popular sports in Texas.
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Campbell had to admit that the initial interest in the ShareLunkers, while positive, made him uneasy. Never mind that some fish came to him with broken lower jaws because they’d been held incorrectly or had fungus growing on their eyes because they had been kept out of the water too long. “I was afraid everybody would say, ‘You killed this fish!’” he said, shaking his head. He has been known to spend hours in the ICU with the lights dimmed, trying to persuade a female to eat a goldfish. Validating his concern, several of the first few lunkers died. Stress, it turned out, is as confounding a problem in bass as it is in humans.
“We can open up a fish and name everything inside, but we can’t tell you why certain things happen,” he said. “There is more we need to know.” Since launching the program, he has been able to refine his methods so that many more ShareLunkers live and spawn.
The day I visited, I watched a male in the courting process. A female ShareLunker as heavy as a Thanksgiving turkey had been taken from the ICU and placed in one of the 15,360-gallon troughs in the warehouse garage. The breeding couple were placed in their own compartment of the trough, separated from each other by a small, black T-shaped net some staffers refer to as a “spawndo” (like a “condo”) that gives the female brief moments of respite from what would otherwise be relentless harassment. The male lingered above a plastic mat that simulated a nest. His goal was singular: Coax his assigned partner to the mat. If she dropped 8,000 to 40,000 of her tiny gold eggs, he could fertilize them and the resulting fingerlings would be released, eventually, into the wild. Oblivious to the circumstances that had provided him with an opening, the male began his flirtation. Slowly, he drifted away from his side of the tank. He rolled onto his back and glided under the lunker like a limbo contestant, attempting to nudge her to his fake nest. The lunker’s reaction couldn’t have been colder—she merely twitched her left eye. He returned—pretty quickly—to his mat, but a few moments later, he approached her again. You had to admire the tenacity.
This male, of course, was not the first to be smitten by a large female bass. The screen saver on Campbell’s office computer runs an automatic slide show depicting anglers with their ShareLunkers, just hours after capture. The fishermen appeared to have witnessed the type of miracle that causes ecstatic tremors and fainting spells.
“I’ve seen adults so excited they couldn’t tell me how to find them,” Campbell said. “I’ve had them on the phone trying to tell me, and the wife is like, ‘No, Jim, you take a left.’”
Anglers are always happy to see him. How many have dreamed of Campbell’s approaching with a net, like the Publishers Clearinghouse Prize Patrol with a giant check? No one has ever refused to turn over a fish, and Campbell sees in this enthusiasm a way to reverse a larger cultural trend. In February 2008 the National Academy of Sciences released a report titled “Evidence for a Fundamental and Persuasive Shift Away from Nature-Based Recreation.” The paper noted that since the eighties, involvement in outdoor recreation has declined 18 percent nationally. Texas is doing better than other states in this regard, but how long can we defy the odds? As more people across the nation watch bass fishing on TV, fewer actually get in their boats and do it.
“When I was a child growing up, fishing was one of those events my family did together,” Campbell said. “Now, unfortunately, many adults are busy. If we can get them interested in the outdoors, they’ll realize the outdoors is not free.” He leaned in. “So okay, I’m reaching out here for the lunker. But what I really want is bigger than that.”
About 2.5 million anglers fish Texas lakes and rivers each year. According to the TPWD, spending by outdoor enthusiasts has a greater economic impact than the state’s cotton, dairy, poultry, and corn industries combined. Taken together, Dell Computer, Lockheed Martin, Electronic Data Systems, and Dow Chemical provide fewer than half the jobs that in-state nature recreation does. According to a 2006 U.S. Fish and Wildlife survey, Texans spend more on fishing—some $3.36 billion—than on any other outdoor activity. And of all the money they shell out on fishing, they shell out the most on bass.
Though fishing brings to mind images of nature undisturbed, Texas’s current frenzied love affair with the largemouth would not exist without human meddling. Long before Rutledge and Kemp, human intervention had begun to alter the piscatory landscape. In the late 1800’s, for example, northern fingerlings were brought to Texas from Illinois, Missouri, and Virginia.
More drastic than any physical relocation of fingerlings was a massive effort, throughout the twentieth century, to dam the state’s rivers for hydroelectric power. This transformation began in earnest in the thirties, as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Though its primary purpose was rural electrification, the indirect benefits to the state’s fish supply were huge. Prior to this, in the early 1900’s, Texas had about 191,000 miles of rivers but only one lake, the swampy Lake Caddo, in the state’s northeastern corner. While flowing water was an ideal habitat for the northern bass, if Texas was ever going to support the Florida subspecies, it would need static water systems—lakes. Roosevelt’s plan gave us just that.
The state had not seen a topographical overhaul as radical as this since the Ice Age. After the drought of the fifties, impoundment levels increased and continued well into the seventies, resulting in about eight hundred public reservoirs—a total of 1.7 million acres that had once been dry land. The impact of these reservoirs on the state’s economic and demographic outlook was dramatic; the effect on its fishermen was profound. Modernizing the state’s infrastructure gave people more leisure time, and many of them spent their extra hours on the new lakes. Entrepreneurs recognized a lucrative business in rods, reels, bait, boats, and motors and began to market their products more aggressively. Interest in bass fishing rose slowly and steadily.
The changes transformed what was once a simple pastime. Today, skills are honed, methods studied, equipment fetishized, and professionals idolized. Fishing is now a sport, and, like running, it has become increasingly sophisticated. Rare is the hungry angler who just sits on the shore, plunks down a lure, and hopes for the best. The introduction of the ShareLunker program dovetailed with a national trend in bass tournaments, opening a whole world of tackle, sponsorship, television programs, and advertising. Most bass fishermen invest time and a hunk of change in boats. If they live in Texas, there’s also a good chance they participate in bass tournaments, since Texas currently hosts about five thousand such events. Though it is difficult to measure this number against other states’, most of the experts I asked agreed that Texas now probably has the most bass events in the country.
Breeding alone will not create the Platonic ideal of a fish—or at least Texas’s gigantic version of the ideal. Scientists from all over the state are needed. Within the first few days of a ShareLunker’s arrival at the Athens fishery center, biologists in the Lunker Bunker investigate the new creature with the curiosity of archaeologists exploring a past civilization. They take blood from its gills to test stress levels, they cut a piece of the fin for DNA testing, and they insert a passive integrated transponder tag behind one of the fish’s pelvic fins so that after release the bass can be scanned and identified with a wand like those used at a store checkout. (If the likelihood of a fish’s repeatedly finding itself in the Lunker Bunker sounds unlikely, it isn’t. Several unlucky fish have ended up riding in the bed of David Campbell’s pickup twice, and one fish from Lake Alan Henry, south of Lubbock, was caught three years in a row.)
A few weeks after I watched lunker intake at Campbell’s lab, I followed a fin sample that had been clipped from a ShareLunker. Its destination was a test tube in the hands of a 29-year-old geneticist named Dijar Lutz-Carrillo at the A.E. Wood Fish Hatchery, in San Marcos. To prepare me for our meeting, Lutz-Carrillo had e-mailed two relevant papers he had written, “Admixture Analysis of Florida Largemouth Bass and Northern Largemouth Bass Using Microsatellite Loci” and “Isolation and Characterization of Microsatellite Loci for Florida Largemouth Bass, Micropterus salmoides floridanus, and Other Micropterids.” When I arrived at his laboratory, he was examining samples taken from descendants of Cuban bass that had been smuggled into a private pond back in the seventies. Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, he seemed like a mellow hipster who could talk as easily about micropterids as indie bands. He asked if I’d received his research papers. I replied that I had. He smiled and winced. “Did they help?”
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