A college laboratory has solved what has been a maddening 13-year mystery: What killed so many of the prized smallmouth bass in the lower Susquehanna and Juniata rivers, beginning in 2005?
The answer — a shocker to Pennsylvania and federal investigators — is largemouth bass virus.
It's a disease that was known to be present in Susquehanna smallmouths but had been ruled out early on because it was thought it couldn't harm them.
Turns out it can be lethal when the shallow water near the banks of the river where young bass roam becomes stagnant and hot, turning into a soupy cauldron of deadly pathogens.
In that environment, the virus does not kill the bass but it allows lesions and ugly sores where bacteria and fungus settle in, proving fatal.
Concerns remain, but there have never been so many big bass in the Lower Susquehanna for anglers.
The discovery was made by scientists at Michigan State University who injected smallmouth bass from a Pennsylvania fish farm with the virus and also proved that mortality was heightened when the fish were in summerlike warm water.
The surprise discovery comes even as the next generation of bronzebacks seem to have built up a semblance of immunity to the virus — or the virus has mutated in a good way.
Fishing for smallmouths — aided by a moratorium on keeping fish — has rebounded mightily the last several years and is today as good as it was in the early 1990s, considered the golden years.
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