Largemouth Bass

Largemouth bass are a green-to-olive sunfish with a dark, broken lateral stripe, a white belly and a jaw that extends past the rear edge of the eye when the mouth is closed, which separates them from smallmouth and spotted bass. The spiny and soft dorsal fins are almost completely separated by a deep notch. A 2022 taxonomic revision split the Florida bass as Micropterus salmoides and reassigned the northern largemouth to Micropterus nigricans; the two interbreed freely where stocked together.

Native to the Mississippi basin, the Great Lakes and the Atlantic and Gulf drainages, largemouth have been stocked in every US state except Alaska and in dozens of countries. Florida-strain genetics produce the giants of Florida, Texas, California and Mexico, where fish over 15 pounds are caught every year; northern waters top out around 8–10 pounds but hold enormous numbers of fish.

Largemouth are ambush predators that use weeds, wood, docks and rock to hide while they wait for shad, bluegill, crayfish, frogs and anything else that moves. They spawn in spring when water reaches about 60–65°F (16–18°C), with males fanning beds in shallow protected water, and the pre-spawn weeks before are when the heaviest females are caught. Summer pushes fish to deep structure, shade and thick grass; fall brings them back shallow chasing shad; winter slows them to a crawl on deep structure, though they still bite a slow-moving bait.

For anglers, the largemouth is the fish. Over a hundred years of lure design, from the first wooden plugs to forward-facing sonar, has been aimed at this species, and the Bassmaster and Major League Fishing circuits pay millions. Fishing for them can be as simple as a plastic worm on a farm pond or as technical as decoding a 100,000-acre reservoir, and the thump of a bass eating a worm never gets old.