Smallmouth bass prefers areas with heavy cover such as weed beds, rocks, and tree shelter. Smallmouth bass is known to attack anything that moves voraciously. Many anglers use standard casting gear and a large magnum-sized lure for smallmouth fishing.
You can use lures that imitate minnows and crawfish for stream smallmouth. Select colors like brown, silver, chartreuse, and white.
Anglers catch smallmouths using conventional baitcasting, fly fishing , or spinning gear, presenting one of the toughest freshwater fish to catch for bass tournaments. Smallmouths are highly regarded for their topwater fighting capabilities when hooked. A much sought-after sport fish, the smallmouth all-tackle world record is maintained by the David Hayes catch of 11 pounds and 15 ounces in Hayes reeled in this monster on the Tennessee-Kentucky border in the dale hollow reservoir.
Smallmouth bass is good for eating and very tasty. It has firm, mild-tasting meat that is easy to cook. You can use this fish in versatile recipes, and to water down the fishy flavor, you can marinate your smallmouth in milk before cooking.
Smallmouth Bass. Micropterus dolomieu. Smallmouth Bass Micropterus dolomieu Smallmouth bass is a freshwater species and a popular game fish in North America.
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Fisheries 26 8 Starnes, W. Odenkirk, and M. Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 4 Stauffer, J. The coloration is also distinctive being usually more brownish in the smallmouth and more greenish in the largemouth.
Generally, the smallmouth has bars radiating back from the eyes, and though similar bars may be present in individuals of other species, including the largemouth, they seem to be more prominent and more consistently present in the smallmouth.
A smallmouth's eyes are red or orangish. In young smallmouths, there is a distinctive band of orange at the base of the tail. This is followed by a black band with the tip of the tail being either white or yellow. The smallmouth bass is native to the eastern half of the U. It has been widely transplanted so that today it occurs in almost every state and many other countries. It is not as widespread as the largemouth bass.
In waters coinhabited by both smallmouth and largemouth, the largemouth bass will spawn a little earlier due to the fact that the shallower nesting sites they choose in protected areas with emergent vegetation warm to the optimum temperature sooner that the deeper, rockier sites chosen by the smallmouths.
There are many who say that the smallmouth bass is gamier than the largemouth. The following are fishing methods used to catch Smallmouth bass:. Do you like this content? Subscribe to our Newsletter and get all the information you need to learn, plan, and equip for your next fishing adventure.
Sign-up to receive our monthly newsletter with interesting blogs about fishing and boating. Problems with the fish have included lesions, blotchy skin, wart-like growths, excessive mucus covering their bodies, lethargic behavior, and abnormal sexual development in which males grow eggs in their testes.
Vicki Blazer, research fisheries biologist with the U. In , it is still believed that rising water temperatures caused in part by climate change, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, and endocrine-disrupting chemicals like herbicides, cosmetics, detergents, and hormones from animal and human waste are stressing the smallmouths and weakening their immune systems.
See Smallmouth Bass are Making a Comeback below. While more study into the causes of the fish kills and illnesses is required, one fact is clear. To restore populations of smallmouth bass, as well as the health of the Chesapeake Bay and its rivers and streams, we must reduce nitrogen and phosphorus pollution.
Of the myriad of contributing factors, this is one factor that people can easily control. And addressing the problem will help sustain the economic benefits of smallmouth bass.
Cutting back nitrogen and phosphorus pollution will help reduce stress on smallmouth bass and other fish. Reducing pollution will also further efforts the Bay states— New York , Pennsylvania , Maryland , Delaware , Virginia , and West Virginia —and the District of Columbia are making to meet mandatory limits on pollution entering the Chesapeake Bay. In , EPA established science-based limits for nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment pollution and allocated reduction targets to each state.
The states then developed and now are putting into effect their own Blueprints for restoring clean water sufficiently to remove the Bay from the notorious Clean Water Act 'dirty waters' list of section [d] of the act. The plans must be in place by
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