Over the years, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has stocked several freshwater power plant lakes, as well as various small ponds and reservoirs, with red drum to create unique angling opportunities for anglers. Although some freshwater bodies of water may still contain small populations of redfish, Calaveras Lake and Braunig Lake are the only two lakes that receive annual redfish stockings.
Anglers chasing reds on these lakes have been consistently catching multi-spotted red drum — with noticeably more spots than most reds caught along the coast, as some sport as many as 100.
According to the Mitchell Nisbet, the TPWD Inland Fisheries San Antonio district manager and biologist, Calaveras and Braunig lakes receive a combined total of 1 million red drum fingerlings each fall. About one-third of these fish go to Braunig, while the remaining two-thirds end up in Calaveras.
Nisbet said TPWD has been stocking red drum in these lakes since the mid 1970s. The fingerlings are a product of the same hatchery efforts that stock coastal estuaries, most typically coming from the Perry R. Bass Marine Hatchery.
Stocking Calaveras and Braunig involves a fairly lengthy process, as the fingerlings must slowly become acclimated to freshwater before officials release them into the lakes. The fish receive a slow trickle of freshwater from the reservoirs while they become acclimated to the lower salinity in tanks on the trucks transported in.
“Because the chemistry and salinity of the water in Calaveras and Braunig reservoirs are different from coastal estuaries, the red drum inhabiting these lakes are unable to spawn,” Nisbet said. “Therefore, annual stockings allow these bodies of water to maintain a sustainable population of red drum. Significant stockings comparable to what we have today began occurring from the early 1990s through the early 2000s, and nearly 1 million fingerings have been stocked annually since about 2006.”
Nisbet said efforts from TPWD to stock a variety of marine species of fish in these reservoirs have occurred throughout the years since they were built. Both Calaveras and Braunig are cooling lakes for power plants, so their waters stay relatively warm year-round.
“The warm water characteristics of these reservoirs made redfish a perfect candidate to be stocked in them,” said Nisbet. “Plus, we already had the red drum hatchery efforts established to support these stockings.”
However, as for the surplus of spots on these freshwater redfish, Nisbet said there is no factual evidence to explain why it happens.
“Perhaps it is because the red drum swimming in these lakes are, for the most part, the top predator in the food chain,” Nisbet said. “They don’t have to contend with sharks or porpoises like they do on the coast. The spot on a red drum’s tail is a biological defense mechanism characteristic that is intended to confuse predators, making them think that their tail is their head. They don’t necessarily need that in the freshwater reservoirs, so maybe that’s why they have multiple spots.”
According to the TPWD Coastal Fisheries Science Director Dr. Mark Fisher, red drum cannot live in waters colder than 39 degrees Fahrenheit. The warm waters of power plant lakes like Calaveras and Braunig allow the redfish to thrive.
Similar to Nisbet, Fisher could only theorize as to why redfish are developing more spots in freshwater.
“We do have fish along the coast that have many spots along their tails and sides,” Fisher said. “Another theory as to why the redfish in Calaveras and Braunig lakes might appear to have more spots than coastal fish could simply be that they are confined to the boundaries of those reservoirs. In other words, there is a large concentration of redfish in a fairly small area on those bodies of water, compared to the vast waters of the Gulf Coast. It could be possible that we have just as many redfish in our coastal estuaries that are sporting a bunch of spots, we just don’t see them as often because they have more water to hide from anglers.”
