Texas to release its billionth saltwater fish in July

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department is announcing the exciting news that it will release its billionth hatchery-produced saltwater fish, a red drum fingerling, into coastal waters next week. This milestone has been more than 40 years in the making, as TPWD has worked with marine biologists and conservationists to ensure that Texas bays have healthy populations of reds, spotted trout and flounder well into the future.

Along with hundreds of other two to five centimeter long juvenile fish, the small red fish will come out in Christmas Bay, located between Freeport and Galveston. TPWD says it plans to release these fish on July 31.

Texas first began considering stocking reds in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when their populations in the Gulf of Mexico were collapsing due to commercial overfishing. By 1975, scientists in Texas, using techniques pioneered in Florida, had found a way to spawn and raise red drum in captivity.

This was the beginning of an ambitious partnership between TPWD, the Coastal Conservation Association, and American Electric Power to build a large-scale redfish hatchery in Corpus Christi. Work began there in 1982, and the first redfish fingerlings were released into San Antonio Bay the following year.

In the decades that followed, biologists also learned how to raise sea trout (also known as speckled trout) and southern flounder, completing the inshore Grand Slam. Fishery managers have since raised millions of these prized sport fish at the state’s three major hatcheries, which are strategically placed along the coastline.

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“Texas now has more juvenile marine fish in stock than any other state,” said Dakus Geeslin, TPWD deputy resource manager Outdoor living“About 80 percent of the fish we stock are red drum, and about 19 percent are spotted sea trout.”

According to Geeslin, the bot program, which represents the remaining 1 percent, has only been underway for about 10 years.

“Flounders are a little more involved in hatching and rearing for stocking than red trout or brown trout,” he says. “But we just passed the one million flounder stocking mark, and we’re proud of that.”

TPWD has also released reds into freshwater lakes, where they can grow to large sizes but cannot reproduce. A few lakes near power plants near San Antonio receive most of these fish. However, the vast majority of the state’s reds (between 10 and 20 million per year, according to the CCA) go to the bays, where they mix with the wild populations and help maintain them.

According to Geeslin, TPWD has conducted more genetic testing in recent years so it can track the young animals released and assess how effective the program has been.

“In the eight major bays along our coast, we can see that somewhere between 6 and 17 percent of the adult reds over the years are the result of our stocking work,” he says. “These figures validate our efforts and we know that they are having a positive effect on the fish populations.”

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These releases have become even more important in recent years to help spotted trout populations, especially in the wake of Winter storm Uriwhich killed at least 3.8 million fish along the coast, according to TPWD. Sea trout were among the hardest hit, with an estimated 104,000 lost in the Lower Laguna Madre alone.

“After the brutally cold winter of 2021, when we had that big fish kill, we tripled our sea trout population from 3 million to 10 million juveniles in the hope of addressing that trout kill,” Geeslin said. “Since then, we have seen a marked improvement in our coastal trout population for that year class, and we believe our increase in fish numbers is the main reason for this.”