"You may say I am dreamer. But I am not the only one." -“Imagine” by John Lennon

With apologies to John Lennon, he should have included an extra verse in his song, “Imagine.” Imagine what fishing might be like if every lake, river, reservoir, and pond in North America were managed to optimum potential? Where bass anglers and bass managers spoke the same language and shared the same goals. It’s really not so hard to do.

If you attended the American Fisheries Society Black Bass Symposium in St Louis in July 2000, when hundreds of bass biologists, researchers, and managers from across Canada and the United States met to share state-of-the-art science and bass management experiences, you could be forgiven for coming away humming Lennon’s catchy tune. Proceedings of this vast symposium are available from the American Fisheries Society, 301/897-8616, www.fisheries.org. Here are just a few project summaries from the book.

Big Bass Dynamics In Florida

For starters, imagine 10-pound-plus largemouth bass. Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission staffers Steve Crawford, Wes Porak, Dennis Renfro and Richard Cailteux can picture them well, some 822 to be precise. That’s how many trophy largemouths the researchers put under the microscope to find out what specifically makes trophy bass—and trophy bass waters—tick.

They found that big bass, contrary to popular opinion, often are the products of strong year classes. But having plenty of young fish moving up the ranks year after year is only part of the equation. You also need productive bodies of water with plenty of the right forage, low abundance of competitive predators, and regulations that protect the fish so they can live long enough to grow huge.

Other than a few gar, largemouth bass are at the top of the food chain in many Florida lakes, with plenty of bluegill and golden shiners for prey. Yet in some lakes, chubsuckers are the most important forage fish. Because of their ease of capture, ideal cylindrical shape, and large size, largemouth may eat chubsuckers up to half their own body length.

In another study lake, shad and blue tilapia dominated the forage base. Yet largemouths there enjoy one of the fastest mean growth rates. Bass have few competitors in this hypereutrophic, vegetation-free lake, so vast preyfish populations have few places to hide.

Few competitive predators and low fishing pressure allow bass to grow old enough (10 to 16 years) to reach trophy proportions. Some Florida lakes become inadvertent sanctuaries when boat ramps are unusable during periods of low water or when weeds grow so dense that anglers quit fishing. The researchers found that limiting harvest plays such an important role that more regulations like protected slot limits and catch-and-release seasons may be necessary.

Managing Grass

As the Florida research demonstrated, strong bass year classes can play an important role in creating excellent bass fishing. When anglers think about ways of increasing the strength of bass year classes, they rarely consider habitat management. Yet the density of vegetation or other cover can affect the number and size of bass that survive their first year.

Managing habitat to increase bass recruitment is even more important now that the era of reservoir construction has passed. Existing impoundments are aging, and where natural woody habitat diminishes and vegetation hasn’t replaced it, largemouth populations decline. But too much grass can be detrimental as well.

Florida’s Lake Kissimmee is a case in point. Until the 1960s, Kissimmee’s water level fluctuated up to 10 feet. This natural fluctuation was beneficial. During high water, weedgrowth flourished. During low water, it died back, and the shoreline dried. After water levels were artificially stabilized, however, plants flourished to excess.

According to Dr. Mike Allen and Kimberly Tugend, researchers at the University of Florida’s Department of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, hydrilla, pickerelweed, cattail, smartweed, and water primrose have choked shallow shoreline zones, and young bass have suffered.

Allen and Tugend studied large-scale habitat enhancement projects on managed and unmanaged sections of Lake Kissimmee. In November 1995, the lake was drawn down and the weeds removed from almost 20 miles of shoreline. The substrate also was scraped clean. Results were immediate and amazing.

Dissolved oxygen concentrations were higher in the enhanced areas (over 6 mg/L) in all daytime samples. Values in the thick, weedy, untouched areas dropped below 2 mg/L, below the level considered dangerous to bass.

Not a single young largemouth was sampled from the weedy control areas, while the density of young bass in the enhanced areas ranged from 40 to 140 fish per acre. Not only were there more young largemouth in the improved habitat areas, but also the fish were bigger, fatter, and more fit. Some yearlings were as long as 7 inches.

In enhanced areas, bass were eating small fish within weeks of hatching. By the following spring, up to 85 percent of their diet was fish instead of invertebrates. These results confirmed findings from other Florida lakes where young bass in weed-free waters consumed fish when they were only three inches long, while bass in highly vegetated lakes didn’t eat fish until they were twice that size. Even in subtropical Florida, the survival of young largemouth bass over the first winter is positively related to their size and growth rate. Clearly, the bass in the enhanced areas of Lake Kissimmee had a kick start on life.

Allen and Tugend also discovered that moderate densities of grass provide food and protection from predators. Densely matted weeds, on the other hand, are too much of a good thing, reducing feeding efficiency and growth.

They suggest that bass managers further study ways to efficiently and effectively manage vegetation, keeping it in check in fertile lakes where natural water fluctuations are blocked, and creating intermediate levels of weedgrowth in reservoirs where vegetation and natural woody habitat are sparse.

If We Build It, They Will Come

Bass managers have long sought to improve fishing by creating cover in shallow areas where bass nest. In places like Bull Shoals Reservoir in Arkansas and some inland lakes in Wisconsin, the practice has been successful. In other places, though, it hasn’t.

Researchers from Michigan’s Grand Valley State University and Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas studied and compared over 650 bass nests in such disparate places as a small Arkansas reservoir, research ponds in Kansas, and a kettle lake in Michigan.

They discovered that regardless of geography or lake type, male largemouths built nests within a narrow range of water depth, substrate, and cover types. Four feet was the average water depth and medium textured sand and gravel was the preferred bottom. No great surprises. But then things got interesting.

Nesting largemouth showed a strong preference for simple, woody cover—an isolated stump, sunken tree, or single log. Although many bass nested near complex brush cover, they did so because it was abundant, not because it was preferred. Indeed, complex woody cover attracts brood predators—making life hectic for Mr. Mom.

“Brood predators use complex structure to hide from guarding parents,” says Dr. Jodee Hunt of Grand Valley State. “A higher density of brood predators coupled with their increased effectiveness makes it risky for males to nest near complex cover. Increased attention to intruders also is costly to parents and their offspring. Chases and other aggressive behaviors are energetically expensive, and intruders draw parental males away from their nest sites.”

What about dumping sand and gravel in deeper water, placing simple woody cover beside it, and then watching bass numbers soar? The researchers tested this habitat manipulation only to discover that no matter how good the nesting site looked, if the new material was unfamiliar or if it was placed in areas that didn’t meet the behavioral needs of the males, they didn’t use it.

They found that habitat improvement also was lake specific. Miss one important ingredient and the efforts failed. Get the blend right, though, and supplemental woody cover can attract nesting males and enhance nest density, the number of successful nests, and recruitment of fingerlings.

“Habitat selection is shaped by experiences in the particular environment in which an individual bass lives,” say the researchers. “Largemouth bass show consistent preferences for their nest sites, but these preferences are tempered by experience. Bass select familiar features and ignore unfamiliar ones. For spawning largemouth bass, habitat that doesn’t attract brood predators is preferred.”

Learning To Love Tournaments

Bass tournaments have become hugely popular across North America. In some states, more than 30 percent of the bass fishing pressure is attributed to competitive events. And that doesn’t include the practice time anglers spend.

Some management agencies work closely with tournament officials, but others take a more neutral or even negative approach. With so many events being staged at the same time and place each year, and with fisheries funding scarce, surely valuable data could be obtained by monitoring events.

Minnesota DNR staffers Don Pereira, Mike Halverson, Rod Ramsell, and Melissa Drake think so. They analyzed tournament data for evidence of changes in the Lake Minnetonka largemouth bass population. The results proved revealing and cost effective.

Lake Minnetonka is a popular bass fishery situated in the west end of Minneapolis-St. Paul. Because the fishing is so good, several major tournaments have been staged there over the years, and a wealth of data has been gathered showing that Lake Minnetonka largemouth have grown larger, older, and more abundant since the 1980s. They attribute the improvements to voluntary catch and release and increasing vegetation in the lake.

But while the quality of bass fishing in Lake Minnetonka has improved, the researchers also discovered that bass growth rates have slowed. Dense Eurasion water milfoil may have an effect, but improved water quality and a shift from eutrophic toward more mesotrophic conditions more likely are responsible.

Minnetonka largemouth also vie with many other species for space in the lake. A large pike population and fewer perch (important food for largemouth) could be slowing bass growth. Walleye and musky stocking programs also could have an effect. And the greater numbers of largemouth could be competing with each other. In peak populations, growth is slow and recruitment low, while population structure is excellent.

The bottom line is that the Minnesota researchers have realized that bass tournaments provide a wealth of reliable and cost-effective ways for agencies to monitor the health of bass populations. They suggest cooperating further with tournament organizers to sample tournament-caught bass before they’re released and to remove otoliths for age determination from dead bass.

Connecticut’s Bold Leap Forward

As scientists conduct more detailed research, it becomes apparent that lakes, rivers, and reservoirs are unique. State-wide and province-wide regulations fail to take into account the characteristics of fish stocks and the relationship of particular fish populations to available habitat, competitors, and forage. At the same time, managing bass is only half the battle. Managing bass anglers is more challenging.

Undaunted by the challenge, Connecticut stepped up to the plate in what Fisheries Division staffers Bob Jacobs, Eileen O’Donnell, and Bill Hyatt call the “bold leap forward.” After more than 30 years of managing black bass with a 12-inch minimum length limit and six-fish creel limit, Connecticut developed a statewide bass management plan implementing slot length limits and higher minimum length limits in more than a quarter of the state’s lakes, with partial exemptions to these regulations for permitted catch-and-release bass tournaments. The plan grew from the results of experimental length limits on selected lakes and statewide electrofishing surveys.

At Moodus Reservoir, for example, they found 74 percent more 12-inch-plus bass following the implementation of experimental length limits. After the limit, anglers caught bass at the rate of 0.27 fish an hour compared to 0.07 an hour just a couple years earlier. Similar results were seen on other lakes where experimental length and protected slot limits were implemented.

Simultaneously, an eight-year electrofishing survey on over 100 lakes and ponds showed that total annual bass mortality rates were high in 27 percent of largemouth populations and 74 percent of smallmouth populations. Bass and panfish populations were often stockpiled. And many lakes contained surplus forage fish.

Upon reviewing 20 years of data, fishery managers proposed that lake-specific length and creel limits were the most cost-effective bass management tools at their disposal. They proposed that more than one quarter of Connecticut lakes be designated in one of two special categories—Quality Bass Management Lakes with either a 12- to 16-inch protected slot limit or a 16-inch minimum length limit (depending on recruitment rates) or as Trophy Bass Management Lakes with either a 12- to 18-inch protected slot or an 18-inch minimum length limit.

Due to tournament popularity and their major economic boost, it was agreed that tournaments would not be held in July or August when warm surface water temperatures reduce bass survival rates. In some lakes, catch-and-release tournaments will be exempt year-round from the special regulations while pen-holding experiments test actual fish mortality. Connecticut’s new plan has received rave reviews, demonstrating what’s possible when good science and objective public consultation come together.