Long ago, the Lower Illinois River was known among anglers as a good place to catch rainbow trout. Nowadays, however, it's known as a great place to catch monster striped bass.

Why? Well, one reason is that the Lower Illinois still gets stocked regularly with rainbow trout -- and stripers love to eat them. Hatchery-raised rainbows are a high-protein treat, and a relatively stupid one: They don't have enough sense to get out of the way when stripers come for dinner.

However, the main reason for the Lower Illinois being such a good striper fishery is that stripers reproduce naturally in the Arkansas River and its tributaries, such as the Lower Illinois and South Canadian rivers benefit. The only other place in Oklahoma where that natural reproduction happens is in Lake Texoma.

Of course, Lake Texoma is world famous for stripers. It may not be the place to go if you want a fish to put on the wall, but if you want to catch a lot of stripers, Texoma still is and always has been hard to beat.

Other than Kaw Lake, which is another Arkansas River impoundment, those are the only places you'll find stripers in the Sooner State. However, the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation stocks many other lakes with white bass/striped bass hybrids, and those are very popular sportfish, especially in southwest Oklahoma.

Except for the tidal rivers of the East Coast, the Arkansas River may be one of the nation's most productive self-sustaining striper fisheries. Gene Gilliland, fisheries research biologist for the ODWC, said that stripers make annual spawning runs up the Arkansas to Zink Dam in Tulsa. If the water is high enough, they'll actually go over Zink Dam into Lake Keystone, all the way to Keystone Dam. Concentrations of stripers are so dense below Zink Dam that the ODWC collects brood stock for its hybrid striper program there.

"The Arkansas River from Webbers Falls Lock and Dam to Tulsa is unimpeded water, and Zink Dam is the first obstruction they come to going upstream," Gilliland said. "It's a low-water dam, and when they're releasing a lot of water out of Keystone, fish can get over it and go upstream. Our guys get in there to collect them because of concentrated numbers, and it's a little safer getting in below a small dam than electro-fishing below a large dam."

In terms of the overall striper fishery, Gilliland said striper populations in the Arkansas River are stable, but they could be better.

"They've never developed a strong striper fishery in Kerr or Webbers Falls or Keystone because that part of the Arkansas has always suffered from water quality problems," Gilliland said. "Even though we have natural reproduction below Zink Dam, the fish don't have an opportunity to get very big because they don't get very old.

"It's an oxygen and temperature problem," he added. "As stripers get older, they get very finicky about the temperatures they prefer. A lot of times in Keystone, to find those temperatures, there isn't enough oxygen that meets their needs, and they have periodic die-offs of these fish before they have the chance to get very old and very big. It has good numbers, but not the deep, cold water that has enough oxygen for those fish to survive through the summer and be healthy."