anglers at Decker but they’ll look impressive when, after 6 weeks of quarantine, they’re finally viewed through the thick glass walls of the floor-to-ceiling store aquaria. Mission accomplished, we head back out and finish the final few
nets. Again, the biggest buffalo wriggle free of the nets before we can weigh and release them. The target species for Decker are white bass, hybrid striped bass, and catfish but we also catch many, many spotted and long-nose gar.
Talking of gar, alligator gar are the only rough fish species being researched and monitored by TPWD. This much-maligned creature grows to huge sizes in Texas but they are in danger. They can take 10 years to reach sexual maturity and there’s a real concern
for the welfare of this Texas native. The indigenous smallmouth buffalo and the introduced carp are not monitored, although in the past there have been a couple of electrofishing surveys of the carp population in Lady Bird Lake. TPWD now relies on the data collected by