Black Bass Diversity: Multidisciplinary Science for Conservation

Suwannee Bass Micropterus notius Bailey & Hubbs, 1949

Eric J. Nagid, Timothy F. Bonvechio, Kimberly I. Bonvechio, and Wesley F. Porak

doi: https://doi.org/10.47886/9781934874400.ch8

The Suwannee Bass Micropterus notius was described by Bailey and Hubbs (1949), and phylogenetic relationships were described in Kassler et al. (2002) and Near et al. (2003, 2004). This species is a relatively small but robust, deep-bodied, black bass species (Hurst et al. 1975) that rarely exceeds a total length greater than 425 mm (Bonvechio et al. 2005, 2010). It has a relatively large mouth and the upper jaw extends under the eye but not past the eye. It has a shallow dorsal fin notch with approximately 12 diamond-shaped vertical bars along both sides of the fish. Its most distinguishing characteristic is the turquoise blue coloration that can be found on the cheeks, breast, and sometimes ventral parts of mature fish that tend to be more profound around the breeding season (Bailey and Hubbs 1949; Gilbert 1978; Page and Burr 1991). Depending on the population examined, the lateral line has 57–65 scales (Bailey and Hubbs 1949; Cailteux et al. 2002b).

Suwannee Bass has the smallest range and geographic distribution among black bass species (Koppelman and Garrett 2002), encompassing roughly 8,500 km² (Bonvechio et al. 2010). Suwannee Bass occur in the Ichetucknee, Santa Fe, St. Marks, Suwannee, Wacissa, and Wakulla rivers of Florida, as well as the Alapaha, Ochlockonee, and Withlacoochee rivers of Florida and Georgia (Dequine 1949; Hellier 1967; Hurst et al. 1975; MacCrimmon and Robbins 1975; Keefer and Ober 1977; Swift et al. 1977; Cailteux et al. 2002a, 2002b; Bonvechio et al. 2005, 2010; Nagid et al. 2010). However, the populations of Suwannee Bass in the St. Marks, Wacissa, and Wakulla rivers are thought to be introduced based on their absence in records prior to the 1990s (Hoehn 1998; Cailteux et al. 2002b) and genetic analyses (Barthel et al. 2015, this volume).