Some stuff you may not know
By Craig Springer
For this article on smallmouth bass, we dig back in our archives to 2011. The article was published in the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service– Fisheries publication, Eddies, Reflections on Fisheries Conservation, Summer Edition 2011. Here we go.
He may have been the most interesting man in the world. Dieudonné Sylvain Guy Tancrède de Dolomieu—his name reads like you’re walking into a vat of cold molasses. Dolomitic limestone is named after him. Smallmouth bass swim in streams that pour over stones of dolomite and carry his name. A quintessential American fish was named by the French ichthyologist Bernard Germain de Lacépède, in honor of his countryman—both of whom never laid eyes on a live specimen. Two hundred years ago, Lacépède called it Micropterus dolomieu, as we still do today.
With five hundred years of angling literature behind us, expressions of how fish behave on the end of a line have grown threadbare by so much wear. Yet, it is hard not to personify some game fishes because they are so memorable. The smallmouth bass is one of them. It is irascible—the consummate game fish.
Early in the 20th century, the smallmouth bass was the celebrated game fish in the United States. U.S. Fish Commission biologist, Dr. James A. Henshall, author of the 1881 treatise, Book of the Black Bass, wrote, “The black bass is eminently an American fish; He has the arrowy rush and vigor of the trout, the untiring strength and bold leap of the salmon, while he has a system of fighting tactics peculiarly his own. I consider him, inch for inch and pound for pound, the gamest fish that swims.”
Originally, the smallmouth bass ranged through the upper Midwest to Quebec, southward to northern Alabama, and west to the eastern edges of Kansas and Oklahoma. Because of its sporting qualities, it has been widely introduced across the country, sometimes to the detriment of native fish. In the late 1800s smallmouth bass went over the Appalachian Mountains into the Atlantic seaboard. Fish Commissioners of the western states and territories sponsored the delivery of smallmouth bass to their waters in the 1880s.
Named for a French geologist by a French ichthyologist, the smallmouth bass is the quintessential American game fish.
Cast in tones of greenish-brown, it’s no surprise this fish is admiringly called “bronzeback.” Surprisingly though, some have a difficult time identifying their quarry. U.S. Fish Commission biologist Fred Mather wrote this 1880s poem, “Bass,” to help anglers know the traits and habits of the smallmouth bass, so as to not be confused with largemouth bass, the only other known black bass at the time. “The little mouth has little scales, there’s red in his handsome eye. The scales extend on his vertical fins, and his forehead is round and high. His forehead is round and high, my boys, and he sleeps the winter through. He likes the rocks in the summertime, Micropterus dolomieu.”
It’s corny, but it gets to the point. Smallmouth bass live in clear lakes with scant vegetation and cool, boulder-strewn streams with deep pools and moderate current. They prefer a lake bottom of boulders, ledges, or bedrock crevices. Stream smallmouth bass go to different parts of the stream according to the time of day, but a bouldery bottom is prime real estate. Smallmouth bass strongly associate with rock bass and northern hog sucker. There’s some evidence of a symbiotic feeding relationship between northern hogsucker and smallmouth bass. The hogsucker has a concave forehead, a useful design for plowing into flowing waters. The concavity pushes the water over its head and its body down to the creek bottom where it peruses the bottom for food with its fleshy lips. The northern hogsucker frequents water during the day where nocturnal crayfish may hole up, avoiding sunlight. They dislodge crayfish, and there the smallmouth bass wait for easy pickings. So as a sucker feeds, so too does the smallmouth bass, underscoring the ecological relationships of two very different fishes.
Smallmouth bass eat mainly crayfish, minnows, and insects with little doubt that the former is the favored fare. However, since crayfish are nocturnal, they are not always readily available. Crayfish are most vulnerable at dusk and dawn, times when both animals are active. Smallmouth bass also dine on small birds, mice, snakes and salamanders, grasshoppers, and hellgrammites.
Smallmouth bass takes up housekeeping in the root tangles of an old sycamore tree, under overhanging willows, or undercut banks on the outside bend of a creek. Rocks are extremely important for breaks from current and visual breaks for places to hide. Rocks are also necessary for spawning. Spawning starts when the water reaches 60 degrees in April or May—earlier than any of the sunfishes. Maturing at three years of age, the male fish fans out a four-foot-wide nest of large gravel in water less than three feet deep. Boulders or submerged logs and overhead shrubbery are almost always associated with nesting sites, probably to lessen the avenues whereby predators can attack. Three or more females may spawn in a single nest and a good smallmouth stream may harbor 400 nests per stream mile.
The eggs hatch in about eight days then the sac fry immediately fall into the rubble where they cannot be seen. Two weeks after the eggs are laid, tiny black fry rise from the rubble to hover above the nest. All the while the male relentlessly stands guard. Shortly thereafter, the fry disperse and fend for themselves. With some luck, one in every several thousand fry may live long enough to make a memory, seizing a crankbait or hair bug and heaving out of the water like no other fish its size can do.
{Craig Springer remembers catching a smallmouth bass over slabs of fossil-littered limestone on an Independence Day picnic in 1974. He wrote a thesis on smallmouth bass habitat modeling 18 years later.}
