Many anglers and biologists assume black bass have a strong territorial instinct because territoriality is common in most large animals. Yet scientific literature contains few reports of territorial behavior in bass outside of nest-guarding behavior during spawning or the reactions of hatchery bass or those in aquaria. Underwater videos often show bass schooled or aggregated, with no evident forceful interactions (called agonistic behavior by biologists) to separate one dominant bass from another.

The practice of observing and recording behavior was once a highly regarded scientific method, but in recent decades researchers have emphasized studies where data can be quantified and tested statistically. Current research seldom indicates how fish behave. Even tracking studies tend to emphasize home range sizes and lengths of movements rather than describing daily activity patterns, how fish search and locate prey, or factors that cause fish to move or change depth.

Last year I created a semi-natural situation to observe territorial behavior among largemouth bass. I monitored a bass pond almost every day from a high vantage position that let me easily see what the fish were doing. For several years I’d observed that when adult bass were active and seeking natural and evasive prey, they either swam alone or in small, loose aggregations along the shoreline, periodically stopping and then moving on. They seemed to seek unwary prey emerging from shoreline cover, fish they could catch with sudden attacks from a range of less than a foot. No particular spot was a consistent feeding ground, and these bass didn’t protect territories.

The pond provides an adequate supply of juvenile bass and topminnows to feed numerous 12- to 17-inch bass. In recent years, larger bass tend to be in poor condition, apparently unable to catch enough food of suitable size. So when a skinny 20-inch largemouth appeared on my shoreline early in the fall of 2001, I started to feed it by tossing out fish fillets, dead shad, and meat cut in the shape of a Slug-Go.

The hungry bass hit anything that seemed to move, almost as soon as it saw the food hit the water. Within a week, she learned to see food in the air and to intercept it when it hit the water. Feeding noises quickly attracted other bass and created competition. Within days, I was feeding five or six bass daily, watching them compete for each morsel. The creation of a special spot where food was routinely abundant and available made territoriality easy to see.

The biggest bass ruled. She, hereafter called “Boss,” tended to hold facing the shore in the prime spot where most of the tossed shad landed. Other bass were forced away if they ventured closer than about 4 feet. At times, when I wasn’t tossing shad, the big fish periodically left her key spot and cruised around a 20-foot-wide circle, but she hogged the prime location.

Smaller bass moved away when threatened and almost immediately returned to less valuable positions behind her as soon as she returned to her spot. Boss didn’t have to actually attack the lower-ranked bass. Simply turning toward them usually was enough to run them off.

During the brief moments when bass competed for a shad, the rules of territoriality were forgotten for an instant, but reappeared as soon as a food item was gone. Smaller and faster bass often dashed ahead of the larger bass to steal food but raced back to their positions 4 to 8 feet to the rear and to either side of larger bass. After one or two such “thefts,” Boss often became more aggressive and actively chased the smaller bass farther away. But leaving her key spot to chase others often resulted in the dominant bass getting fewer shad if I was tossing food at regular intervals.