TYLER, Texas — There are a lot of fist bumps and high-fives being handed out at the Texas Freshwaters Fisheries Center in Athens.
The 2022 Toyota ShareLunker season will go down as one of the best in the program's nearly 40-year history. We visited the TFFC the day the last ShareLunker donated to the program this year was returned to her home lake.
The 2022 ShareLunker season was one-of-a-kind. Two dozen legacy class ShareLunkers (bass that weighed over 13 pounds) were caught between January and March. That's the most caught in a single season since 1995.
But what might be more impressive is that this year, the TFFC boasts a 100% survival rate.
“Every ShareLunker that was donated to us and brought to this facility was returned back to alive to the lake she was caught in for somebody else to go and have the best day of their life,” Tom Lang, TFFC director, said.
That's no easy task. Some years not every bass survives. Catching, hauling, maintaining, spawning puts a lot of stress on a fish. Hatchery manager Tony Owens said watching the last fish leave the Lunker bunker is a load off his mind.
“You know you’re dealing with those bigger fish like that, they’re the senior citizens of the fish world," Owens said. "They’re toward the end of their life you could say, and they just can’t take a lot of stress sometimes."
The goal of the program is geared at selectively breeding big fish. This year, Texas Parks and Wildlife biologists are discovering their efforts are paying off.
A genetic analysis shows a ShareLunker caught in Lake Austin this year is the offspring of a ShareLunker caught from Richard Chambers Reservoir in 2008. A fish caught this year in O.H. Ivie is the daughter of a ShareLunker caught in Ivie in 2012. And this same ShareLunker is somehow related to another ShareLunker caught from Ivie in 2021.
“And it’s that partnership between the anglers, the industry, Toyota, our sponsor and our biologists here at Texas parks and Wildlife, all working together for 36 years to create fish like that all across the state," Lang said.
Here are just a few ShareLunker highlights from 2022. Five fish were greater than 15 pounds, including a 17-pound bass caught at O.H. Ivie which also happened to be the biggest fish in 30 years caught in Texas and the seventh largest bass ever verified in Texas. Four ShareLunkers made the top 50 biggest largemouth bass of all time list and ShareLunkers were caught in nine different waterbodies across the state. Two came from Lake Daniel. That was a milestone for the ShareLunker program.
Daniel became the 75th different lake to be home to a ShareLunker.
“The 75th different public lake to produce a 13-pound bass for this program. Seventy-five Texas lakes producing 13-plus pound bass. Yeah, we’re the big bass capital of the world, here in the state of Texas," Lang said with a big grin.
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Inland Fisheries division isn't done yet. They are taking the ShareLunker program one step farther. They've paired male ShareLunker offspring with female ShareLunker offspring and are growing a new kind of bass called Lone Star Bass. We will have more on this new program on an upcoming Hooked On East Texas.