I was browsing species info at the NC Wildlife site (click). I knew a lot of fish we take for granted as "normal" now were introduced and were once invasive. Rainbows from the PNW, brown trout from Europe, smallmouth bass from the central US and most catfish from the Mississippi (only bullheads are native). But I did not realize that white bass are from Gulf drainage rivers, so they are only native to a few western NC rivers or that our native brookies are being crowded out by another genetically different strain. The real shocker is white crappie - they aren't native. We often complain about how the fisheries are being messed up by introducing new species, but unless there is some other fish I am not considering, the mountain fishing in the pioneer days probably wasn't very good if the weaker brookie strain was the only decent fish here. The Piedmont lakes didn't have crappie or channel cats and not all lakes and ponds have LMB unless they are introduced; they are native but were not ubiquitous.
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