Late summer and fall provide some of the best freshwater fishing opportunities

By FWC Staff

When a male largemouth bass prepares a spawning bed and the female lays her eggs, the pair typically produces 5,000 – 10,000 fertilized eggs, and it may happen multiple times during the breeding season that starts in the springtime.

The male protects the eggs until they hatch two to four days later, then the young fish or fry live off yolk sac for a couple of weeks, after which they start feeding on microscopic animals. The male continues protecting the fry until they reach about an inch long, and they start eating other fish – including their own brothers and sisters. They can eat fish half as large as their own bodies, but they also eat insects, frogs, crayfish and shrimp among other things.

Over a spawning season, a big female largemouth bass can produce 100,000 eggs, but only two of them have to survive long enough to become adults and to breed to keep the population stable. That takes two to four years in the wild.

Bass survive by taking advantage of their keen senses of sight, smell, taste, hearing and touch, plus a lateral line that enables them to detect motion in the water around them. That helps them catch food, even when they can’t see well.

They can see colors and contrasts. They seem to like reds and whites in shallow water, and anglers know to use those colors on the lures used to catch them.

About 822,000 anglers target largemouths and other black bass in Florida every year. If you take the number of bass fishermen and multiply it by the number of days they spend fishing for them, the total is 15 million fishing days. That compares to 6 million fishing days for red drum, the most popular saltwater fish in Florida.

Florida has its own distinct strain of largemouth bass in the southern two thirds of the state. In the rest of the state, the largemouth has a mixture of Florida and northern largemouth bass genes, which don’t grow as fast. Nearly all the top 25 bass reported anywhere have some Florida bass genes.

The largest bass ever caught was a 22.25-pounder, certified in 1932. The largest ever caught in Florida weighed a little more than 20 pounds, but fisheries biologists believe there are larger ones swimming in Florida’s waters right now.

The oldest largemouth bass ever recorded in Florida was 16 years old. Scientists can tell how old a fish is by counting the rings on its ear bones, similar to the way they can tell how old a tree is by counting the rings in its trunk.

All trophy bass are females, because typically only females get larger than 20 inches long or weigh more than four pounds. Sometimes the males get a little larger than that, but not typically.