How Largemouth Bass Respond to a Large Reservoir Habitat Enhancement Project

Approximately 2,000 augmentation structures (trees, stumps, and rock piles) have been placed throughout Table Rock Lake, Missouri to improve fish habitat for largemouth bass Micropterus salmoides and other species. Our objective was to determine habitat selection of largemouth bass following a large scale habitat improvement project. Seventy largemouth bass (>380 mm total length) were implanted with radio transmitters in April 2011 and relocated monthly through June 2012. A discrete choice analysis was used to link structure, depth, distance to shore, aspect, and slope at sites used by largemouth bass to three randomly-selected available sites.  We built a set of 12 a-priori models to best predict seasonal use of habitat by largemouth bass and ranked these models using Akaike's Information Criterion.  Results from our top seasonal models suggest largemouth bass select for intermediate depths (2-7 m) in areas near shore (<25 m) throughout the year. During summer and fall selection of structure was also important, the relative probability of selecting coarse woody debris during summer (0.22) and fall (0.15) was selected at a similar rate to complex augmentation structure during summer (0.21) and fall (0.14), suggesting largemouth bass are utilizing augmentation structure at a similar rate to naturally occurring woody structure.