64 Mississippi Sportsman^ | April 2015
For
some bass anglers, sight fishing for
bedding bass is the ultimate rush.
Other anglers consider bed fishing
unsportsmanlike, with some asserting it adversely
affects bass abundance.
So which group is right?
Beginning more than a decade ago, a small group
of biologists investigated the effects of catching
nest-guarding male bass and determined that bed
fishing affects production of young from individual
bass nests.
Here is a recap of the evidence from multiple
research studies that found adverse effects of bed
fishing or, more specifically, the effect of removing
the guarding male from a nest of fertilized eggs of
recently hatched fry:
• When a bass is removed from the nest, untended
eggs and fry are often eaten by predators. The lon-
ger the guarding male is gone, the more offspring
are lost to predators.
• A caught bass that is immediately released
resumes its guardian duties. The longer a bass is
played or the longer it is exposed to air ( for exam-
ple, to admire or to take a picture), the slower the
bass is to return to the nest after it is released.
• A caught bass that is displaced ( for example,
caught in a tournament and released at the weigh-
in site) often returns to the nest, but the time
to return increases with the distance the fish is
moved from the bed.
• The “guardianship” of the male bass — how
aggressively and effectively it defends
the nest and its contents — decreases
as the brood size diminishes. If the
brood size is heavily depleted by preda-
tors, the male bass might abandon the
remaining brood.Bass bed fishing
Does sight fishing hurt largemouths?
ABOVE: A Florida team
of biologists performed a
two-year experiment to
determine the impact of
catching guarding male
bass from nests.gettin’ fresh
Hal Schramm
Hal Schramm is an
avid angler and veteran
fisheries biologist. Does bed fishing harm bass
populations? The science doesn’t
indicate the case.Andy Crawford