Gotcha, I'm from there and have fished it for over 40yrs myself. Why you haven't seen one is beyond me. I have seen them in the stripe I have cleaned. Maybe the bass favor the threadfins, I don't know. It's really a mute point though, the stripe serve as a top predator to regulate shad, both gizzard and threadfins and the hybrid of the two. I'm glad they are there since it gives me another species to Target.
I have heard for years that the stripe eat all the young bass and crappie etc from bass and crappie fishermen and that they are the reason their catches are down. Not saying you said this but I have heard it form LOTS of others. I asked a taxidermist who regularly mounts stripe what he sees in their belly. He told me that 90% of what he sees are gizzard / TF shad, then maybe some of the others, bream, crappie , bass etc. but they make up less than 10%.
We caught some a few years back that actually had some of the biggest crawfish I have ever seen come out of them. Only time I'd ever seen that