Smallmouth Bass in Cultus Lake

A couple of months ago, we published an alert notice on the presence of smallmouth bass in Cultus Lake when the northern pikeminnow capture crew encountered a couple during the program in the spring. There was surprisingly fair amount of skepticism of this news even though the notice came from BC’s Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy.

This morning, I accompanied Region 2 biologist Colin Schwindt, and Martina Beck from Ministry’s invasive fauna unit head who spent the day sampling the lake for specimens. Several smallmouth bass were captured, including both juveniles (1 year old) and adults (3 ~ 5 year old). Their stomach samples were collected and their age will be determined at the lab.

How smallmouth bass will impact native species in Cultus Lake including endangered sockeye salmon is unknown at this point, because there simply isn’t enough information to determine that.

Colin has asked anglers who fish the lake to retain smallmouth bass if you encounter them (the current daily quota is 20), and bring them to DFO’s Cultus Lake Salmon Research Lab (4222 Columbia Valley Highway).

More information can be found on this page.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2018 at 8:08 am and is filed under Biology, Conservation, Fishery issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.