TP&W is being run by some clueless dolts right now for sure.

Problem with stupid people, they don't know they're stupid.
Right here in little Seadrift, they've allowed the pillaging of the oyster beds to probably the point of no return, which has really hurt the trout fishing, so they then put up the stupidest trout limits in place.

Someone please explain the logic here, 3 trout, 15-20" long. You can watch a boat load of shrimp slingers catch 50 short trout, kill every one of them trying to catch one keeper. Want to make the limit 3? Fine, catch three and go home.

There were 300 oyster boats working the bay, mostly out of state, every single reef was flattened to the bottom of the bay. Seriously stupid people in charge.

Hey if it stops them from spraying and killing off any more aquatic vegetation I'm all ears.

Personally I could care less about deer hunting...anyone who thinks they are "HUNTING" deer in Texas is a complete moronic fool. You are only shooting deer in Texas, not hunting....real manly indeed.

Really dude? Is that necessary?

I've never in my life owned a feeder.... and have shot three Pope and Young whitetails with my bow on public lands. It's as hard of deer hunting as exists. And deer of that size on public lands with a bow is one of the most challenging game animals to hunt.

If you could care less about deer hunting maybe you don't know what you are talking about and should leave the conversation to the adults.

As someone said, if the new people in charge would quit killing grass in our lakes I would be all for them. Hydrilla is the preferred cover for largemouth bass, it provides cover for fry, and is the perfect meeting place for bass and fishermen. You don't need LiveScope to pull up to a grass bed and know there are probably fish in and around it.

Idiots have been allowed to decimate fish habitat in our public waters. Homeowners and local authorities have teamed up to poison it and TP&WD has gone along with the destruction.

Actually, hydrilla is a poor choice for many reasons. There are native forms of vegetation which provide cover, filtration, and littoral zone habitat which are much less proliferous and much easier (although seldom necessary) to control. In deeper lakes like Sam Rayburn it's not as large a problem as it is in shallower lakes like Conroe, with a lot of relatively shallow water. Biologists will tell you that hydrilla can quickly become so proliferous that it even becomes detrimental to bass fishing. And if you do a little digging, you just might learn that politicians were the reason that TPWD's biologist were disregarded when it came to vegetation control. Back in the 90s TPWD and the Corps of Engineers' LAERF were attempting to reestablish native vegetation in Conroe. I was working closely with the TPWD and USACOE biologists, and saw firsthand the sabotage (and a lot of our sites were sabotaged) and the misinformation being disseminated by the program's opponents. Unfortunately, those opponents (the same ones who facilitated overstocking Conroe with grass carp in the first place) had enough money and political connections to overrule the TPWD and LAERF biologists. But believe me, TPWD and the biologists were not the problem. Politicians were.

Only the female hydrilla variant flourishes in Texas; thus hydrilla here is much easier to control relative to other states.....it is also more fragile and susceptible to droughts followed by flooding and cold snaps.
I have never seen hydrilla be a safety or water supply problem in Texas (quite the opposite)

Yes, I have certainly seen salvinia be a big problem....and salvinia eradication methods even a bigger problem (Murvaul)

Those regular grass carp sold to the state as fake triploid grass carp live more than twenty years and reproduce no problem.....total disaster.

we are fishing at a state park in East Texas, they are growing experimental native grass is fenced off areas.
we are catching 2 lb. crappie on almost every cast.

I attended a "stakeholders meeting" at Lake Tyler about 15 years ago. As president ofa local bass club I was there to represent fishermen. The meeting was hosted and run by Richard Ott, biologist for TP&WD. All we and the other fisherman present requested was that some areas of the lake(s), such as the far north ends and the Stake Island area that had no homes or boat docks anywhere near them, be left alone and not sprayed. What we ended up getting was a massive amount of Aquathol K all over the lake, completely eradicating every bit of vegetation in both lakes. The "authorities" then came back and planted idiotic little fenced in enclosures of "native plants". They were maybe six feet across. How many bass were the little patches going to hold, and how was anyone supposed to fish them?

They never prospered, never spread, and 15 years later we have a lake with virtually no vegetation in it other than a few lily pads in areas.

I knew as soon as Ott introduced his "team" and announced that they had worked on the Lake Conroe grass eradication that we were screwed. We were and still are in terms of grass.

Agree.

There is no native grass that even comes close to Hydrilla.

Hydrilla will keep the native grasses from getting established. They have to eradicate it and keep it from reintroduction in order to establish native vegetations. The only thing worse than hydrilla is salvinia.

It's only been 15 years so I guess the native grasses haven't had time to grow.

I think we all know that if "native grasses" ever got a foothold lakeside homeowners would want them killed, too. They don't want weeds in their big swimming pool.

OK so you and maybe about 5 other people actually hunt...everyone else in Texas is a canned hunt hunter. Is that better? Again...it takes a real special person to shoot something off a feeder behind a high fence and then thump your chest like a man.

Kind of like using 5 monitors, live scope, side imaging, etc, to catch a fish?

Pretty dang close.