Rainbow trout released midwinter into Kingsley Lake, in Clay County, Florida. Waters here are cool enough to sustain the fish for several months—or until local bass gobble them up!
July 09, 2025
By Sid Dobrin
Pre-dawn in January, and it’s cold and dark. I’m standing waist-deep in shorts in 53-degree lake water, uncontrollably shivering like an electrified tuning fork, as about 3,500 pounds of live rainbow trout are being dumped into the water around me.
This is Florida? Sure is!
The rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) have been hauled to Kingsley Lake in north central Florida from a hatchery in Missouri. The trout are part of an ongoing experiment by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) to increase trophy-size bass in Florida lakes.
Kingsley Lake already supports some huge Florida bass, like this 13-pound, 3-ounce fish logged in 2022. Researchers are studying the impact of providing bass with highly nutritious rainbow trout as supplemental forage. Of course, stocking the lake has the added benefit of furnishing Kingsley anglers the rare opportunity to catch a few rainbow trout—which are native to the Pacific Ocean watershed, from Alaska to northern Mexico—in a Florida lake.
Advertisement
Trophy Bass Project Headed up by FWC Research Biologist Drew Dutterer, the Kingsley stocking program is part of a larger ongoing project: the Trophy Catch Program. Trophy Catch has been around for about a decade and is a citizen science and angler recognition program. Dutterer works on the more recently developed Florida Trophy Bass Project, focusing on finding ways fisheries managers might develop methods for generating more exceptional and rare big bass, like 15- to 16-pound lunkers.
Given Florida’s patchy history of non-native fish introductions (ahem... tilapia) significant research and caution were undertaken before introducing rainbow trout to Florida waters. Working with Dr. Jeff Hill, a non-native and invasive aquatic animal ecologist with the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (IFAS), Dutterer and fellow researchers identified Kingsley Lake and Suwannee Lake, a small impoundment near Live Oak, as potential test sites. Because rainbow is a coldwater species that rarely survive in water temperatures above 68 degrees, Kingsley was identified as having moderate to low risk of species establishment. Dutterer and his team spent nearly five years studying the possibility of introducing rainbow trout to Florida waters before initiating incremental releases into Kingsley and Suwannee lakes.
Rainbows acclimating to spring-fed Kingsley Lake. In the early days of the experiment, trout to be released were implanted with radio tags to track their movements and acoustic depredation tags that identify whether the fish had been eaten. Subsequently, Dutterer’s team has released fish surgically implanted with telemetry tags.
Advertisement
In 2024 and 2025, they scaled up the experiment, releasing nearly 6,400 pounds of trout in 2024 and approximately 5,000 pounds of trout between January and February 2025 in Kingsley, many implanted with depredation sensors or telemetry sensors. The trout ranged from 8 to 12 inches, small enough for bass to feed on and large enough for anglers to enjoy the catch.
The trout used in the January and February 2025 stocking were sourced through Crystal Lakes Fisheries, a family-owned commercial hatchery in Ava, Missouri. Cost was $34,500 for Kingsley, and $15,250 for Suwannee, including delivery. Previous stocking waves were sourced a little more affordably through North Carolina suppliers, Dutterer explained, but those businesses were disrupted by Hurricane Helene.
In 2024, sensors in the fish broadcast predation data into May, which was when the water in Kingsley began to warm beyond the trout’s tolerance levels (Kingsley benefits from deep, cool spring-fed waters). In 2024, the researchers’ primary objective with the telemetry was to understand the extent of predation or the percentage of introduced fish that got eaten. The sensors cannot discern whether the fish was eaten by a bass or another kind of animal—like a raccoon, alligator, eagle or gull—but the team was able to identify that a significant part of the introduced fish were eaten.
Rainbow trout sign at Florida’s Kingsley Lake. The tags that the researchers use are equipped with a digestion sensor that uses a polymer to identify when stomach acids digest a fish. The stomach acid of the predator, like a bass, takes about a day to digest through the trout, make contact with the polymer, and trigger the tag to send the information to sensors placed at various locations around the lake. The signal starts a timer that lets researchers back-calculate when the predation happened.
That data provides a resolution to the timing, and they can look at the percentage of the tagged fish for which the digestion sensor triggered in order to estimate how many of all the fish were eaten by something in the water. In 2024, approximately 45 percent of the digestion sensor-tagged fish indicated that they were eaten.
These numbers—along with the other data the researchers collect, like the depth where the bass and trout “interact”—are important because they allow them to understand whether introduced high-protein forage like the trout are actually eaten by the bass. “They are probably the most calorie-dense fish that you could feed a bass that we’re aware of right now,” said Dutterer.
Dutterer is also clear: “We hope to be able to detect changes in the bass population that show positive improvements with more trophy bass being caught.”
To evaluate Florida bass growth rate response to having stocked trout as forage, Dutterer said the team, “will be looking for increased occurrence of bass greater than 13 pounds and tracking average relative weight of trophy bass submitted to TrophyCatch from Kingsley Lake.”
Relative weight, he explained, ”is a ratio of a bass’ actual weight to the average weight we’d expect based on its length. Since we are still in the process of wrapping up the 2025 evaluation, we don’t yet have estimates of average relative weight or if it’s increased.”
Drew Dutterer (left) surgically implants trout with telemetry devices before release. Dutterer did note that a parallel experiment at the Florida Bass Conservation Center in Richloam revealed that captive bass fed a diet of rainbow trout gained more weight than bass fed bluegill or lake chubsucker.
“It’s unlikely that we’ll being expanding our experimental trout stocking to new lakes yet,” said Dutterer.“However, we plan to continue stocking Rainbow Trout at Suwannee and Kingsley for several more years. On average, it takes 10 years to grow a 10-pound bass in Florida. It may take several years to see the results.”
About Kingsley Lake Located in Clay County, just west of Stark (in Bradford County), Kingsley Lake is Florida’s oldest and highest lake. Spanning approximately 2,000 acres, Kingsley is sometimes called Silver Dollar Lake because of its nearly perfect circular shape and clear water. Believed to have formed as a sinkhole, the lake’s origins date back to the Pleistocene Era.
Kingsley has been home to Camp Blanding, the primary training base for the Florida National Guard, since 1939. Occupying nearly half of Kingsley’s shoreline and 73,000 acres, Blanding served as a U.S. Army training facility during World War II. It is still an active military base.
Kingsley Lake is a “perched lake,” meaning that its water level is higher than the surrounding groundwater. Kingsley is primarily fed by springs, rainfall, and seepage; a shallow layer of unconsolidated sand allows water to percolate through it. While most of the lake is relatively shallow, there’s a deep hole in the middle, reaching 90 to 100 feet, making it one of Florida’s deepest lakes (side note: I dived this hole several years ago and was stunned by how clear the water is at depth). This depth contributes to the reasons Kingsley was selected for the trout stocking program, as the lake warms significantly slower than other Florida lakes, providing a longer duration of survivability for the trout.
Access is limited to lakefront residents and military personnel with valid ID (through Camp Blanding). Kingsley popped up on FWC’s radar through the TrophyCatch Program because of the unusually large number of big bass caught there. Early in TrophyCatch, eight bass over 13 pounds were logged with the program, and since then, more over-13-pound bass have been registered from Kingsley than any other lake in the state. Last year, in the 12th season of TrophyCatch, Kingsley anglers registered 22 bass over 13 pounds. The next closest lake in numbers of bass of that size was Orange Lake which registered 18 big fish. Kingsley outperforms all other Florida lakes in terms of trophy bass production.
Public access to Kingsley is limited. With approximately half of the shoreline occupied by Camp Blanding and the other half by private property, the lake is mostly used by military personnel and local residents. Fishing pressure is low, allowing for more of the trout to be eaten by bass and other predators than find their way to the table. The researchers have posted signs by the boat ramp at Camp Blanding asking anglers to release any rainbow trout they catch; however, several Kingsley anglers told me that they had great success catching rainbow trout in January and February but wouldn’t say if they released them or fried them.
A Program with History The Trophy Bass Project didn’t emerge without precedent. Dutterer points out that the idea for the stocking program was derived from a similar initiative that began in 1959 in California when professional baseball player Orville Ball brought about 20,000 fingerling Florida largemouth bass from Cypress Springs and released them into ponds in San Diego County. Ball hoped to introduce the Florida strain of largemouth bass into California waters, confident they would grow larger and provide anglers with the opportunity to catch trophy-sized fish.
The Florida strain of largemouth bass has a genetic predisposition to grow larger than California’s northern strain (which had been transplanted from Minnesota in the late 1800s). As a result, California saw a dramatic increase in the number of trophy-sized bass caught.
Today, California lakes like Castaic Lake, Lake Dixon, and Clear Lake are populated with Florida bass. These lakes have yielded numerous bass over 20 pounds (including the famed Lake Dixon bass “Dottie” which was caught multiple times and weighed over 20 pounds), and some even close to the world record.
California began selectively stocking some of its bass lakes with trout, which seemed to significantly boost the growth of largemouth bass. Unfortunately, throughout the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, these stocking efforts were not monitored well enough to provide significant data about the results. Fisheries management continues to stock some California lakes with trout as forage to maximize trophy bass potential. However, as California fisheries managers become more attentive to the ecological impacts of introducing non-native species, they are beginning to consider strategies to restore native trout populations rather than focusing on maximizing bass size.
Florida seems to have dedicated to the Trophy Bass Project adequate cautionary scientific oversight to ensure the experimental introduction of rainbow trout into limited Florida lakes unfolds without putting native waters or species at risk.
Florida anglers will be watching with keen interest.
This article was featured in the June 2025 issue of Florida Sportsman magazine. Click to subscribe.
