Poking Holes in Bassin’ Beliefs
By Dr Hal Schramm
I’m a fishery biologist. Anglers I meet at the boat ramp often say, “Man, you’ve got the best job in the world.” I agree, but those conversations usually occur on warm, sunny days. They might not be so envious when we come in after pounding waves in a jonboat when its 38°F and raining. Of course, they’re not at the lake those days.
There are many plusses to being a fishery biologist, but some drawbacks as well. For one, I’ve got a dermatologist on retainer. I was 20 before they invented sunblock, and 40 before I had enough sense to use it. Then there’s hearing loss from sitting next to a generator in an electrofishing boat. (Well, maybe it’s old age, but it’s a novel excuse.)
Cartoon by Peter Kohlsaat
At the end of my list of drawbacks: Being a biologist can curb the fun of being an angler. I believe what I’ve learned in biology helps me catch fish. But all that book learnin’, seasoned with 30 years of observing fish and their habitats, can really wreck the moment when I read the contemporary wisdom packed into popular fishing articles.
I’m reading an article, maybe about a new can’t-miss technique or hot lure, and really getting involved. “Yep, I gotta try that,” I’ll think to myself. But just as I’m about to start loading rods in the boat, the glossy-page bassin’ hero confidently states something any card-carrying fishery biologist recognizes as malarky.
That’s cause for consternation, kind of like snakes in toilets and other urban myths. Do I accept the fishing wisdom and ignore the bonehead biology, or figure the angling information is as far off base as the biology? Knowing that writers get paid by the word and not by the number of facts, I tend to ignore the biological faux pas, believe the fishing wisdom, and head to the lake after stopping at the local liar’s emporium to buy that new swimbait in 10 different colors.
Well, it’s time for revenge. I’m here to expose a few fishing myths and not-quite-true statements I’ve read recently. I’m also including a few tips that could lead someone to conclude that anglers go out of their way to make fishing difficult and to drive us crazy.
Water Temperature: Hot Wind about Cold Fronts
Countless fishing articles bring water temperature into the tale. No doubt it has a major influence on bass behavior. And temperature is easily measured. What modern bass boat doesn’t have a temp gauge? Of course, it measures the temperature where the boat sits, not where bass are. Just a minor technicality, often ignored by high-tech bassers.
From a Q & A column:
“The preferred temperature of largemouth bass is 60-78°F; smallmouth prefer 55-72°F.”
Not far off, but how can you miss when you give almost a 20-degree range? Fishery biologists often state the preferred temperature range of adult largemouth and smallmouth at 77-86°F, and there’s evidence that the smallmouth’s preferred temperature may vary a little between seasons. Optimum temperature—the temperature at which bass are metabolically most efficient and get the most growth from food eaten—can be more precisely defined. It’s about 80° for both largemouth and smallmouth. In other words, bass seem to prefer temperatures that convey the greatest energy gain.
Although there’s a lot of interest in preferred or optimum temperature, what does it really mean? Fishing warmer water during coldwater seasons and cooler water during the summer is a good idea, but are you going to ride around in the late spring or fall seeking optimal 80-degree water?
Preferred and optimum temperature, if available, is where you’ll most likely find bass, but keep in mind that they may be inactive while peacefully digesting to get maximum energy from a recent meal. When it’s chow time, bass go where their prey are, regardless of temperature. I’m not a fish psychologist, but a bass on the hunt should be easier to catch than one on siesta in its ­optimum-­temperature home.
I’ve captured bass by electrofishing for over 30 years. Countless times I’ve had anglers tell me how cool (they often mean unfair) it must be to know where the fish are. Yeah, I confess I’ve slipped back to some of those spots with a more primitive collecting tool and tried to catch them. In only a couple of those situations did I succeed; most often I hauled water.
But the converse is true—I can always collect bass with the electrofisher where people catch them with rod and reel, provided depth isn’t beyond the normal range of the shocker, about 10 feet. The lesson is you can find bass in many places, but they’re catchable in only a few of those.
From numerous articles:
“Water temperature plummeted after the cold front.”
Water cools when air cools, but how much and where are important. I’ve measured temperature change in my shallow (average depth 41⁄2 feet), 3.5-acre pond. On a clear, calm night, an 8°F drop in temperature from dusk to dawn lowers water temperature about 2°F. Temperature drop is considerably less when it’s cloudy, and a 14-degree dusk-to-dawn temperature drop reduces water temperature only 1.5°F. These measured changes likely apply to small, shallow coves or bays. Expect much smaller temperature changes in the main body of a lake or reservoir.
If you want to use falling temperatures as an excuse for a tough bite, use it cautiously in summer. Any cold-front-induced temperature change occurs in the upper part of the water column. Don’t many bass tend to hold in deeper, cooler water in summer? So if bass hold down near the thermocline to find preferred or optimum temperature, shouldn’t a big chill attract them to the shallows? Articles often talk about bass moving to the shallows in late winter or early spring to bask in warmer water. If bass were so good at finding warmer water in spring, shouldn’t they be as good at finding cooler water in summer?
“Fish riprap on a sunny winter day because rocks warm the water,”says a pro.
Ever sit on a chunk of granite on a cold day? Cold, eh? Why would a rock warm any more or any faster than a clay, gravel, or sand bank? Now a dark, algae-covered rock is a different story—it absorbs more light than a light rock and heats more. Heat happens when something absorbs the energy of sunlight.
More conflicting information on warming water from articles that quote professional anglers:
Pro A: “I look for turbid water in early spring because it warms faster.”
Pro B: “In early spring, I focus on clear, shallow pockets because the sunlight reaches and warms the bottom, and that warms the water.”
Cartoon by Peter Kohlsaat
After some reading and discussions with limnologists, it seems to boil down to the dark rock principle—heat happens when light is absorbed. Suspended particles in turbid water absorb light and warm surrounding water. In clear water, light that’s not absorbed in the water column will be absorbed by the bottom, so the bottom, too, can generate heat.
But shallow water is constantly mixing, so it doesn’t matter whether the heat is generated in the water column or on the bottom. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether the water is clear or turbid. Another important note on clear water: If you can see the bottom, that means that light is being reflected back out of the water and is “wasted” in terms of generating heat in the water column. So, muddy up the water and fish it tomorrow.
Bass Porn
From an article on bed fishing: “The male bumps the female to loosen the eggs.”
Bass courtship and spawning rituals can get a li­­­­­­­ttle rough, but it’s not to loosen the eggs. Hatcheries go out of their way to give brood fish a lot of TLC, and female bass drop their eggs without being bumped, nudged, or battered.
Getting Light-Headed
Another environmental condition that affects bass behavior is light. Light, or more specifically what affects light transmission—water clarity—is fertile ground for anglers’ cogitation and writers’ prose because clarity constantly changes, challenging the Holy Grail of fishing—getting a bite. I like clear water, and it surprises me that some anglers actually seek turbid water to catch bass, given their nature as sight-feeders. I guess cashing some of those big tournament checks by fishing mud would make me change my mind.
Biologists don’t know how much light bass prefer because it isn’t something they can control to create better bass populations, so it’s not studied. But anglers fully appreciate the importance of light and water clarity in determining where, when, and what lure colors to fish. Due to the importance of water clarity, anglers have developed their own scale for measuring it. If you’re a student of water clarity you probably know there are several such scales.
One is the murk scale; water ranges from clear to very murky with intermediate values of slightly murky and rather murky. Another is the stain scale, also with intermediate values. Then there’s the stain-murk scale where water ranges from clear to various degrees of stained, followed by several degrees or murkiness, finally ending at mud. Bass anglers weigh and measure their bass, dwell on water temperature, and obsess with boat speed. Is there some reason they don’t measure light or water clarity?
One successful (and rich) tournament pro does measure water clarity. He states, “Determining water clarity is essential in making this pattern produce. I judge water clarity by slowly lowering a spinnerbait into the water. If I can see the lure at 4 inches or deeper, I call that water ‘stained.’ If the lure disappears at less than 4 inches, I call it ‘highly stained.’ And if the lure disappears immediately when it hits the water, that’s ‘muddy.’ With this system, I can compare water clarity in different spots, and when I get a pattern going with a particular bait and water color, it gives me a way to extend that pattern to other areas.”
Another highly successful (and also rich) tournament pro writes that, “Clear water” is a relative term.” (Amen to that.) To resolve any possible confusion, he notes, “Clear water is where I see a lure in water deeper than a foot and a half, stained water is where I can see a lure from 8 inches to a foot and a half, and muddy water is where I can’t see my lure in 8 inches.”
Obviously, these two anglers don’t need to be swapping information. For us less-creative anglers, how about we just note clarity in feet and inches? For example, there are times when I can see a white spinnerbait 30 inches below the surface. Maybe that’s not the right culture-speak for the boat dock or the weigh-in stage, however. Somebody might think you work at a university or something. But measuring water clarity in inches is useful if you’re one of those fact-loving anglers who keeps a fishing log. An inch will be an inch five years from now, whereas the definition of stained and murky may change based on the next how-to article you read.
One more misconception about light in water: “Fish a spinnerbait in the twilight zone, the depth where it just disappears from view.” Like many of the tips relayed by sage fishing writers, this one often works. But why? Because if you can’t see the bait, bass can’t see you. Right? Wrongamundo. For you to see a spinnerbait, light must pass through the water, reflect off the spinnerbait, and travel back to the surface. But the vision of bass is entirely different, and fortunately for them, far better than ours.
I’m not aware of studies that measured the minimum amount of light bass need to see objects, but as a general rule, fish can see at one-tenth the light we need to see. Because of the properties of light in water, bass can see a spinnerbait at approximately four times the depth at which you can see it. Try to figure that depth out using the stain or murk scale.
pHishing at Dawn and Dusk
How many times have you gotten up four hours before normal people to enjoy a dawn topwater bite? Or endured a fishless afternoon and 100 mosquito bites to whack ’em right before dark? Here’s what the wrapped-boat crowd has to say about whether dawn or dusk is best.
Pro W: “I like the morning better because the fish aren’t too active at night if it’s been a really hot day, so they feed early before it gets hot out and they head deep again.”
This guy fishes where the bass have some strange rules: No feeding at night or in deep water if it’s hot.
Cartoon by Peter Kohlsaat
Pro X: “I’d rather fish early. The water quality is higher in the shallows in the morning because the pH level goes down at night as the plant life become inactive.”
Partly right. The pH decreases through the night and is lowest at dawn because plants—both rooted plants and phytoplankton—are using oxygen and producing carbon dioxide, which lowers pH. Although pH got a lot of attention in the 1980s and bass tolerate only a certain range of it, there’s no hard evidence about the effects of pH on bass feeding. If you believe that high pH is good, sleep in and fish the dusk bite.
Pro Y: “Dawn is a better time to fish during summer because bass feed more actively in the shallows at night, and this usually continues into the first hours of dawn until they head to deeper water.”
Unlike Pro W, this guy’s fish are much less regimented and can feed whenever they want. I’ve always wondered if bass move deep after the topwater bite dies or whether they just hang out and wait for low-light conditions to become more active again. An interesting study in heavily vegetated Lake Seminole on the Florida-Georgia border provides some insights. Adult bass followed a daily onshore-offshore movement pattern. Deep or shallow, bass were always associated with good cover. No loitering in the shallows for that bass bunch.
­­­
Biological Blarney
And you can find a few pearls of wisdom from the ivy-tower crowd, as well: “Reservoirs are artificial lakes.”
Lakes can be formed in almost 100 different ways. Man-made dams are just one. Most lakes in North America were formed by glaciers and sinkholes. I concede that since the dam was not created by nature, the reservoir is man-made; but I can’t call it an artificial lake. Fortunately for anglers, the reservoir is filled with real water and real fish, and you do need a real license to fish there.
“Bigger lures catch bigger bass.”
This study looked at a bunch of small, starving bass striking lures more than half their own length. There’s abundant research suggesting that bass and other piscivorous fish consume forage smaller than the maximum size they can eat. In-Fisherman Editor and fishery scientist Rob Neumann got it right in his article in the June-July 2008 issue on what pike and muskie eat. He described prey size as a wedge—as a predator grows, the largest size prey it eats increases, but it also continues to eat small prey. Bass, like other predators, are opportunists—if it’s close, if they can catch it, and if it fits down their throat, it’s dinner.
Dr. Hal Schramm, Starkeville, Mississippi, is leader of the Mississippi Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. He’s also a freelance outdoor writer and avid angler.
By Dr Hal Schramm
I’m a fishery biologist. Anglers I meet at the boat ramp often say, “Man, you’ve got the best job in the world.” I agree, but those conversations usually occur on warm, sunny days. They might not be so envious when we come in after pounding waves in a jonboat when its 38°F and raining. Of course, they’re not at the lake those days.
There are many plusses to being a fishery biologist, but some drawbacks as well. For one, I’ve got a dermatologist on retainer. I was 20 before they invented sunblock, and 40 before I had enough sense to use it. Then there’s hearing loss from sitting next to a generator in an electrofishing boat. (Well, maybe it’s old age, but it’s a novel excuse.)
At the end of my list of drawbacks: Being a biologist can curb the fun of being an angler. I believe what I’ve learned in biology helps me catch fish. But all that book learnin’, seasoned with 30 years of observing fish and their habitats, can really wreck the moment when I read the contemporary wisdom packed into popular fishing articles.
I’m reading an article, maybe about a new can’t-miss technique or hot lure, and really getting involved. “Yep, I gotta try that,” I’ll think to myself. But just as I’m about to start loading rods in the boat, the glossy-page bassin’ hero confidently states something any card-carrying fishery biologist recognizes as malarky.
That’s cause for consternation, kind of like snakes in toilets and other urban myths. Do I accept the fishing wisdom and ignore the bonehead biology, or figure the angling information is as far off base as the biology? Knowing that writers get paid by the word and not by the number of facts, I tend to ignore the biological faux pas, believe the fishing wisdom, and head to the lake after stopping at the local liar’s emporium to buy that new swimbait in 10 different colors.
Well, it’s time for revenge. I’m here to expose a few fishing myths and not-quite-true statements I’ve read recently. I’m also including a few tips that could lead someone to conclude that anglers go out of their way to make fishing difficult and to drive us crazy.
Water Temperature: Hot Wind about Cold Fronts
Countless fishing articles bring water temperature into the tale. No doubt it has a major influence on bass behavior. And temperature is easily measured. What modern bass boat doesn’t have a temp gauge? Of course, it measures the temperature where the boat sits, not where bass are. Just a minor technicality, often ignored by high-tech bassers.
From a Q & A column:
“The preferred temperature of largemouth bass is 60-78°F; smallmouth prefer 55-72°F.”
Not far off, but how can you miss when you give almost a 20-degree range? Fishery biologists often state the preferred temperature range of adult largemouth and smallmouth at 77-86°F, and there’s evidence that the smallmouth’s preferred temperature may vary a little between seasons. Optimum temperature—the temperature at which bass are metabolically most efficient and get the most growth from food eaten—can be more precisely defined. It’s about 80° for both largemouth and smallmouth. In other words, bass seem to prefer temperatures that convey the greatest energy gain.
Although there’s a lot of interest in preferred or optimum temperature, what does it really mean? Fishing warmer water during coldwater seasons and cooler water during the summer is a good idea, but are you going to ride around in the late spring or fall seeking optimal 80-degree water?
Preferred and optimum temperature, if available, is where you’ll most likely find bass, but keep in mind that they may be inactive while peacefully digesting to get maximum energy from a recent meal. When it’s chow time, bass go where their prey are, regardless of temperature. I’m not a fish psychologist, but a bass on the hunt should be easier to catch than one on siesta in its ­optimum-­temperature home.
I’ve captured bass by electrofishing for over 30 years. Countless times I’ve had anglers tell me how cool (they often mean unfair) it must be to know where the fish are. Yeah, I confess I’ve slipped back to some of those spots with a more primitive collecting tool and tried to catch them. In only a couple of those situations did I succeed; most often I hauled water.
But the converse is true—I can always collect bass with the electrofisher where people catch them with rod and reel, provided depth isn’t beyond the normal range of the shocker, about 10 feet. The lesson is you can find bass in many places, but they’re catchable in only a few of those.
From numerous articles:
“Water temperature plummeted after the cold front.”
Water cools when air cools, but how much and where are important. I’ve measured temperature change in my shallow (average depth 41⁄2 feet), 3.5-acre pond. On a clear, calm night, an 8°F drop in temperature from dusk to dawn lowers water temperature about 2°F. Temperature drop is considerably less when it’s cloudy, and a 14-degree dusk-to-dawn temperature drop reduces water temperature only 1.5°F. These measured changes likely apply to small, shallow coves or bays. Expect much smaller temperature changes in the main body of a lake or reservoir.
If you want to use falling temperatures as an excuse for a tough bite, use it cautiously in summer. Any cold-front-induced temperature change occurs in the upper part of the water column. Don’t many bass tend to hold in deeper, cooler water in summer? So if bass hold down near the thermocline to find preferred or optimum temperature, shouldn’t a big chill attract them to the shallows? Articles often talk about bass moving to the shallows in late winter or early spring to bask in warmer water. If bass were so good at finding warmer water in spring, shouldn’t they be as good at finding cooler water in summer?
“Fish riprap on a sunny winter day because rocks warm the water,”says a pro.
Ever sit on a chunk of granite on a cold day? Cold, eh? Why would a rock warm any more or any faster than a clay, gravel, or sand bank? Now a dark, algae-covered rock is a different story—it absorbs more light than a light rock and heats more. Heat happens when something absorbs the energy of sunlight.
More conflicting information on warming water from articles that quote professional anglers:
Pro A: “I look for turbid water in early spring because it warms faster.”
Pro B: “In early spring, I focus on clear, shallow pockets because the sunlight reaches and warms the bottom, and that warms the water.”
After some reading and discussions with limnologists, it seems to boil down to the dark rock principle—heat happens when light is absorbed. Suspended particles in turbid water absorb light and warm surrounding water. In clear water, light that’s not absorbed in the water column will be absorbed by the bottom, so the bottom, too, can generate heat.
But shallow water is constantly mixing, so it doesn’t matter whether the heat is generated in the water column or on the bottom. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether the water is clear or turbid. Another important note on clear water: If you can see the bottom, that means that light is being reflected back out of the water and is “wasted” in terms of generating heat in the water column. So, muddy up the water and fish it tomorrow.
Bass Porn
From an article on bed fishing: “The male bumps the female to loosen the eggs.”
Bass courtship and spawning rituals can get a li­­­­­­­ttle rough, but it’s not to loosen the eggs. Hatcheries go out of their way to give brood fish a lot of TLC, and female bass drop their eggs without being bumped, nudged, or battered.
Getting Light-Headed
Another environmental condition that affects bass behavior is light. Light, or more specifically what affects light transmission—water clarity—is fertile ground for anglers’ cogitation and writers’ prose because clarity constantly changes, challenging the Holy Grail of fishing—getting a bite. I like clear water, and it surprises me that some anglers actually seek turbid water to catch bass, given their nature as sight-feeders. I guess cashing some of those big tournament checks by fishing mud would make me change my mind.
Biologists don’t know how much light bass prefer because it isn’t something they can control to create better bass populations, so it’s not studied. But anglers fully appreciate the importance of light and water clarity in determining where, when, and what lure colors to fish. Due to the importance of water clarity, anglers have developed their own scale for measuring it. If you’re a student of water clarity you probably know there are several such scales.
One is the murk scale; water ranges from clear to very murky with intermediate values of slightly murky and rather murky. Another is the stain scale, also with intermediate values. Then there’s the stain-murk scale where water ranges from clear to various degrees of stained, followed by several degrees or murkiness, finally ending at mud. Bass anglers weigh and measure their bass, dwell on water temperature, and obsess with boat speed. Is there some reason they don’t measure light or water clarity?
One successful (and rich) tournament pro does measure water clarity. He states, “Determining water clarity is essential in making this pattern produce. I judge water clarity by slowly lowering a spinnerbait into the water. If I can see the lure at 4 inches or deeper, I call that water ‘stained.’ If the lure disappears at less than 4 inches, I call it ‘highly stained.’ And if the lure disappears immediately when it hits the water, that’s ‘muddy.’ With this system, I can compare water clarity in different spots, and when I get a pattern going with a particular bait and water color, it gives me a way to extend that pattern to other areas.”
Another highly successful (and also rich) tournament pro writes that, “Clear water” is a relative term.” (Amen to that.) To resolve any possible confusion, he notes, “Clear water is where I see a lure in water deeper than a foot and a half, stained water is where I can see a lure from 8 inches to a foot and a half, and muddy water is where I can’t see my lure in 8 inches.”
Obviously, these two anglers don’t need to be swapping information. For us less-creative anglers, how about we just note clarity in feet and inches? For example, there are times when I can see a white spinnerbait 30 inches below the surface. Maybe that’s not the right culture-speak for the boat dock or the weigh-in stage, however. Somebody might think you work at a university or something. But measuring water clarity in inches is useful if you’re one of those fact-loving anglers who keeps a fishing log. An inch will be an inch five years from now, whereas the definition of stained and murky may change based on the next how-to article you read.
One more misconception about light in water: “Fish a spinnerbait in the twilight zone, the depth where it just disappears from view.” Like many of the tips relayed by sage fishing writers, this one often works. But why? Because if you can’t see the bait, bass can’t see you. Right? Wrongamundo. For you to see a spinnerbait, light must pass through the water, reflect off the spinnerbait, and travel back to the surface. But the vision of bass is entirely different, and fortunately for them, far better than ours.
I’m not aware of studies that measured the minimum amount of light bass need to see objects, but as a general rule, fish can see at one-tenth the light we need to see. Because of the properties of light in water, bass can see a spinnerbait at approximately four times the depth at which you can see it. Try to figure that depth out using the stain or murk scale.
pHishing at Dawn and Dusk
How many times have you gotten up four hours before normal people to enjoy a dawn topwater bite? Or endured a fishless afternoon and 100 mosquito bites to whack ’em right before dark? Here’s what the wrapped-boat crowd has to say about whether dawn or dusk is best.
Pro W: “I like the morning better because the fish aren’t too active at night if it’s been a really hot day, so they feed early before it gets hot out and they head deep again.”
This guy fishes where the bass have some strange rules: No feeding at night or in deep water if it’s hot.
Pro X: “I’d rather fish early. The water quality is higher in the shallows in the morning because the pH level goes down at night as the plant life become inactive.”
Partly right. The pH decreases through the night and is lowest at dawn because plants—both rooted plants and phytoplankton—are using oxygen and producing carbon dioxide, which lowers pH. Although pH got a lot of attention in the 1980s and bass tolerate only a certain range of it, there’s no hard evidence about the effects of pH on bass feeding. If you believe that high pH is good, sleep in and fish the dusk bite.
Pro Y: “Dawn is a better time to fish during summer because bass feed more actively in the shallows at night, and this usually continues into the first hours of dawn until they head to deeper water.”
Unlike Pro W, this guy’s fish are much less regimented and can feed whenever they want. I’ve always wondered if bass move deep after the topwater bite dies or whether they just hang out and wait for low-light conditions to become more active again. An interesting study in heavily vegetated Lake Seminole on the Florida-Georgia border provides some insights. Adult bass followed a daily onshore-offshore movement pattern. Deep or shallow, bass were always associated with good cover. No loitering in the shallows for that bass bunch.
­­­
Biological Blarney
And you can find a few pearls of wisdom from the ivy-tower crowd, as well: “Reservoirs are artificial lakes.”
Lakes can be formed in almost 100 different ways. Man-made dams are just one. Most lakes in North America were formed by glaciers and sinkholes. I concede that since the dam was not created by nature, the reservoir is man-made; but I can’t call it an artificial lake. Fortunately for anglers, the reservoir is filled with real water and real fish, and you do need a real license to fish there.
“Bigger lures catch bigger bass.”
This study looked at a bunch of small, starving bass striking lures more than half their own length. There’s abundant research suggesting that bass and other piscivorous fish consume forage smaller than the maximum size they can eat. In-Fisherman Editor and fishery scientist Rob Neumann got it right in his article in the June-July 2008 issue on what pike and muskie eat. He described prey size as a wedge—as a predator grows, the largest size prey it eats increases, but it also continues to eat small prey. Bass, like other predators, are opportunists—if it’s close, if they can catch it, and if it fits down their throat, it’s dinner.
Dr. Hal Schramm, Starkeville, Mississippi, is leader of the Mississippi Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit. He’s also a freelance outdoor writer and avid angler.