Category: Science
Water Resources at your Fingertips
Whether you’re planning on hitting the local lake or river this weekend, or driving halfway across the country to compete on unfamiliar water, having some insight in advance as to what water conditions you will face can be an important tool in forming a fish catching game plan. Thanks to the Internet, lots of great [...]
When Keeping and Eating Bass Is a Good Thing
In order for special regulations such as slot-based size limits to be effective, you have to have anglers that are willing to harvest fish within or around that slot. Given that the catch and release rates for bass have, on many waters around the country, grown to over 90%, potentially changing to such a regulation [...]
The Mysterious Blue Crayfish
Blue crayfish, do they really exist? Of course they do – just seems like you don’t see many of them in the wild. I hadn’t either until this past December when I found numerous examples during drawdown on a local reservoir (see pic). According to an older research paper (1970) I came across, crayfish coloring is likely the [...]
Science: 3 Pieces of a Puzzle that Don’t Fit Together
There are several research studies that suggest largemouth and walleye just not cohabitating well. It’s become a big fishery issue up in the Wisconsin/Minnesota area, one of the centers of walleye angling. A recent study looked at walleye and black bass interactions in northern Wisconsin lakes. The researchers used data collected from 1,862 northern Wisconsin lakes over 74 years [...]
Science: Bass Club Weigh-ins
There has been some speculation that smaller “club level” tournaments might be doing more damage to bass or bass fisheries than larger, more visible events. Part of this was based on the fact that there are simply a whole lot more smaller events held throughout the country than there are larger professional events, and on [...]
Science: Bass and Warm Water Discharges
A common belief held by many anglers is that most bass tend to hang in and around the warm water discharge areas of thermally heated reservoirs, especially during the cold water periods. While this is probably the case in some reservoirs, it is turning out to not always be the situation in others. Researchers electrofished [...]
Science: Largemouth Bass and Planted Cover
Older reservoirs slowly lose cover options as they age, especially a lot of the smaller woody debris. Missouri Department of Conservation and cooperators placed approximately 1,600 fish attracting structures (trees, stumps, and rock piles) throughout Table Rock Lake, Missouri to improve fish habitat for largemouth bass. They then implanted 60 largemouth bass (>15″ total length) [...]
Biodegradable Fishing Line – You buying?
I’ve come across the mentioning of biodegradable fishing line a few times over the past year, so I finally sat down and dug up some info on it. At first glance it doesn’t seem like something the average basser would want to invest in, but the details make it sound rather interesting. There are a couple [...]
Can You Name Your Fish? Many Can’t
As avid bass anglers, about all we have to figure out is the difference between largemouth, smallmouth and spotted bass every now and then - everything else we catch doesn’t matter. However, when you look at fish identification from a research standpoint, especially when you are talking about DNR angler surveys and asking people what fish [...]
The Fish Communities of Small Impoundments
If you’re not necessarily of the tournament bassin’ mind set, there’s a good chance you might do at least some of your bass chasing on the many small impoundments located throughout the country, defined in some recent research as 1,000 acres or less. The fisheries though can be all over the board, with some being good really good, [...]
Science: Big Bass & Weather
Maybe you’re like me. I don’t live in Texas or California, but I sure like following all the big bass catches out of those states. One of the neatest presentations I saw a few years back at a conference was by Gene Wilde, a Texas Tech researcher, on a theory of just what causes these states [...]
C&R: Too Much of a Good Thing?
Two fairly recent pieces of research discussed the growing trend of catch and release angling in the bass fishing world and some of the potential implications, both good and bad with this trend. Have bass anglers gone overboard in their zest for this practice?
Where You Hook’em Matters
Some more very cool research. This study from Wilde and Pope (Texas Tech Un.), “A Simple Model for Predicting Survival of Angler-Caught and Released Largemouth Bass” used temperature acclimated largemouth bass and manual hooking in a controlled lab experiment to determine catch and release mortality (immediate or delayed). Using a 2/0 barbed worm hook manually embedded [...]
Rollin’ Mud Blues
Seems like at times we get more than our fair share of rain. Every time water levels get near normal for a couple days, along comes another storm and in comes the water. More times than not, that water is rolling in mud, especially in our river systems, which many eventually end up feeding into our reservoirs [...]
Science: Bait Color and Selection
Response was great to our Science post a couple weeks ago on Shad Dynamics. Check it out at the link if you haven’t seen it already. It was listed as a “Top-5″ favorite science piece, which brought out the questions about what were the other four. So, we thought we’d dig out another one to [...]
Science: It Sucks Being Shocked
If you’re a bluegill, that is. I love coming across little bitty “one-liners” either in articles or research papers that either stand out as being profound, or explain via scientific documentation something generally perceived or accepted in the bass fishing world. Kind of like one of those “A-HA” moments. I don’t find many of them, [...]
Science: Understanding Shad Dynamics
If you’re going to spend any amount of time fishing reservoirs where shad are the primary forage for bass, especially if you live in the Midwest, then you really need to have a good understanding about the relationship between reservoir ecology and gizzard shad. There is probably nothing more dynamic and inherently tied to everything that happens [...]
