The Changing Nature of Managing Bass

From Texas to Minnesota, I hear a common refrain from anglers: “Man, it’s getting harder and harder to catch a bass.” Many are quick to offer the reason: “It’s all the pressure.” Although the cause-and-effect—namely, that the fishing effort (“pressure”) makes the bass harder to catch—is tricky to pin down, there is some good science to support the anglers’ lament that bass may be getting harder to catch.

Sixty years ago, bass fishing was primarily a southern pastime. Bass fishing in northern lakes was excellent and quietly enjoyed by a few anglers, but the growth in popularity and participation was in the South. Many reservoirs were new with expanding fish populations; others were still young and filled with good, easy-to-find habitat. Bass fishing was excellent. For a while.

With time, catch rates—the number of bass caught per angler hour—declined. Angler harvest was partly to blame. The fishing ethic at the time was hook and cook, and biologists documented that bass populations could be severely depleted in just a few weeks after a new impoundment opened. Minimum-length limits and lower harvest limits were implemented to maintain bass abundance. Biologists also attributed the decline to a boom-and-bust cycle in which the high productivity of a newly impounded reservoir declined after the abundant nutrients from the newly flooded land were used up.

With numbers of avid bass anglers surging upward and bass tournaments growing, conservation of bass populations became a concern. Using bass tournaments as a stage and with strong media support, the practice of catch and release (C&R) spread rapidly through the bass-fishing community. Today, live-release rates among bass anglers are 85 to 95 percent. Black bass are as abundant as ever in most waters. Indeed, many fishery managers assert that the lack of harvest has diminished the effectiveness of selective harvest regulations, like slot limits, designed to improve bass growth and size structure. With lakes full of bass, catch rates should be high.

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