Are your feelings hurt? That was the opening line of the post accompanying the Instagram reel. A sad music track, like one you might hear in an apocalyptic drama during the scene where it becomes clear all hope is lost, sets the tone as an oven door screeches open. Oliver Ngy’s hand then reaches inside and slowly extracts a baking sheet holding the charred remains of a fat, 4-pound largemouth. As if the whole-roasted bass wasn’t triggering enough, Ngy proceeds to peel off its crispy skin and free chunks of flesh from its bones and feed them to his dogs.
At face value, the post looks like nothing more than selfish, barbaric pot stirring for the sake of social media attention. But, if you took the time to read Ngy’s entire caption, you’d see that wasn’t the case. It was, in my mind, one of the bravest and most brilliant pieces of content a big-time influencer in the bass world ever produced.
How you define a “trophy” bass likely does not match Ngy’s description. He built his name and brand, Big Bass Dreams, around the pursuit of largemouths weighing north of 10 pounds. The California-based angler has a multitude of teen-class fish to his credit, including a 17-pound, 6-ounce personal best. Since the 2010s, Ngy has been using various platforms to educate legions of hopefuls seeking that kind of glory. But his latest lesson is a lot less hopeful.
In his opinion, it’s no longer worth putting in the effort for truly giant, jaw-dropping bass because so few of them exist anymore. Why? Because we have become so obsessed with and protective of largemouths in this country that many of us refuse to keep them, and we often criticize those who don’t practice catch-and-release. But in some cases, this mindset is killing nature’s ability to maintain balanced fisheries.
Ngy is not alone in this opinion. Biologists and other experts have been screaming “selective harvest” for years, but nobody wants to listen. Will you? If killing a limit of bass every time you’re on the lake would create a better fishery for your kids or their kids, could you bring yourself to do it?
Or will you keep tossing those 2 pounders back so they “become 5 pounders,” which — spoiler alert — they probably won’t.
Too Much of a Good Thing
The first big largemouth I ever caught — I’d say right around 5 pounds — fell in the late 1980s to a wad of nightcrawlers soaking on the bottom of a local lake. Without thought or hesitation, my Italian grandfather rammed the metal spike of his nylon stringer through its gills and unceremoniously slid it down to rest atop the three channel catfish gasping for oxygen on the other end. This wasn’t weird to me.
But by the time I was a teenager, guys like my grandfather, the proverbial members of the “bucket brigade,” were villains at any body of water where bass were the main attraction. As it became harder and harder to catch quality fish in places that would routinely kick out heavies when I was younger, blaming an uptick in “meat fishermen” was the easiest way to explain your failure. Never would I have considered that my valiant catch-and-release policy on largemouths had anything to do with local ponds and lakes becoming shells of their former selves. And, even though I paid no attention to professional bass fishing at the time, I had been influenced by it nonetheless. Probably, just like you.
“If you step back in time and look at where tournament fishing got its start, anglers were bringing those bass to the weigh-in dead,” says Shawn Good, a veteran fisheries scientist with the Vermont Fish & Wildlife Department. “Within a few years, though, these tournament directors started thinking they needed to do something different because they were taking all the biggest fish out of these waters and thought there wouldn’t be any left. Skip ahead all these years and catch-and-release is such an ingrained ethos among bass anglers that now we’re doing damage from the opposite end. Instead of damaging the population by taking all the big ones out, you’re damaging it by never allowing them to get big in the first place.”
Here’s the basic premise: Too many bass competing for too little food results in a stunted population within a closed system. The same theory applies if you’re talking about a farm pond or a massive reservoir. Water body size only dictates how quickly the fishery can be altered.
“The early to mid-90s were insane for trophy bass in California. That was the pinnacle,” says Ngy. “Of course, I was too young to be a part of it. By the time I started chasing big bass seriously in the early 2000s, the fishing was still good, then it seemed to plateau, and now it’s in decline even on some of the historical trophy lakes out here.”
Science backs up what Ngy is experiencing on the water. Just recently, he took part in a shocking survey on Puddingstone Lake with the California Department of Fish & Wildlife. Twenty years ago, Ngy say, Puddingstone was a factory for 6- to 8-pound bass with the occasional 10 tossed in. The more recent study took place over a 6-week period, but in just the one day Ngy was present, 300 fish were sampled. Of them, 100 measured 12 to 15 inches — approximately 1 to 2 pounders. The rest measured more than 15 inches, which to many anglers sounds like a good thing.
“That’s a bunch of 3-plus-pound fish. Sounds great, right?,” Ngy says. “Until you learn that only three of those 200 weighed more than six pounds.”
To be clear, a lot more comes into play when assessing bass population health than just overcrowding. Water levels, fish kills, weather patterns, baitfish cycles, and all manner of other environmental factors contribute. But those, for the most part, are beyond our control. What is in our control is our ability to thin the school. But according to Ngy, professional bass fishing has also altered our ability to see the greater potential in many fisheries.
Who Needs Science?
Guys like Ngy are anomalies. Your average weekend angler has zero expectation of catching a 10-plus-pound bass because waters with an abundance of fish that size are few and far between. Even in places they do exist, smart tournament anglers know better than to swing for the fence looking for one double-digit behemoth. Your worth as a competitive fisherman is measured not by one or two good bass, but the total weight of your bag. Over time, bass culture has come to put those who can consistently catch 4- to 6-pound fish over the course of a few days on a higher pedestal than those who catch a handful of 8-plus-pounders over the course of a season. The trickle-down effect is that, by and large, American bass anglers are content with 5-pound fish. If a water body is perceived to have plenty of those with the occasional 6- or 7-pounder mixed in, then it’s typically considered to be balanced. And in many cases, particularly on smaller waters and in colder climates, that weight range might, in fact, be as good as it’s going to get. What we fail to understand, however, is just how little it takes to diminish even the number of 4- to 5-pound bass in any body of water.
“We shouldn’t keep and kill all the fish we catch. That’s obvious,” says Georgia-based Shan O’Gorman, a 30-year veteran of building and managing private lakes and ponds. “But what’s being neglected here is the part where fish can also spawn too much, so you have to correct for that as well. Too many bass leads to over-spawning and overcrowding.”
A trained biologist, O’Gorman is a legend in the bass scene because of his reputation for growing big fish quickly. (For reference, he can pretty much guarantee you 7-plus-pounders in 3 years.) The secret? It’s his way or no way. If he takes you on as a client, he expects you not to do anything to your pond or lake unless it’s authorized by him. The science behind his work would require a book to cover, but one of the easiest ways to grow big fish is to have them survive on mainly bluegills. By being intensely specific about what can and cannot go into that water, he creates a food chain that’s balanced and sustainable. The funny thing is, despite all the money O’Gorman is being paid, many clients still don’t listen.
“What they’ll do is go on the internet and gather all this misinformation. A lot of it comes from hatcheries that just need to sell fish,” he says. “They’ll tell these pond owners to diversify their forage and so on, and the next thing I know they’re dumping shad and shiners in there and undoing what I did.”
The root of O’Gorman’s message is that too many anglers think they know better than scientists. Take, as an example, that pond close to your house that’s just chock full of 1- and 2-pound bass. You and everyone else has been catching and releasing them for years thinking you’re giving them a chance to grow. What you’re not factoring in is natural selection.
“Not every bass has the potential to reach five pounds,” Good says. “That has nothing to do with human interference, that’s just nature. Think of a bass population in the shape of a bell. If you have an abundance of fish in, say, that 2- to 3-pound range, then fish weighing above that are naturally fewer. The fishery could not sustain itself if they all reached the top of the bell curve. Many small bass get eaten by larger bass. Many small bass don’t make it through the winter. Yet despite that, people lose their minds when they see someone kill a 2-pounder.”
So, then why don’t damaged fisheries correct themselves? Well, they do (or try), but Mother Nature can only work with what she’s given. Fisheries compensate for overcrowding, or a diminished amount of food, or loss of depth because the spillway has been clogged for years by creating smaller fish that can survive with less protein or less oxygen or less space. Overcrowding is, in many instances, based on the misconception that we’ll “fish out” a body of water and completely rid it of bass. According to O’Gorman, that’s hogwash.
“People have no idea how much effort it takes to correct a fishery by harvesting it,” he said. “Let me tell you something. Once a lake gets past 20 acres, I can’t keep enough fish out of it with an electro-shocking boat. You got 10,000 acres of water that need 10 or 20 bass removed from each acre? You need to remove 20,000 bass. If every single person who fishes the lake was out there every day, it would still be nearly impossible.”
Ironically, many diehard bass anglers would be happy to see no-kill regulations placed on bass everywhere in the name of protecting them. But what they miss is that states set seasons, size limits, and bag limits not to appease the lowly, bloodthirsty bucket brigade, but to manage a fish population so it is balanced, healthy, and features a nice mix of size classes. Unfortunately, their efforts are mostly in vain because we all throw bass back anyway.
Managing Expectations
“In Vermont, the general, statewide regulations say you can keep five bass a day with a minimum length of 10 inches,” Good told me. “So, you can harvest five 5-pounders and that’s perfectly legal. But as biologists we know that doesn’t happen. We know very, very few people are doing that. So, really what we’re doing is setting a regulation that allows a few people to do it once in a while and maintain a healthy population. But anglers still get very upset with us and say, ‘Why are you letting people take five fish per day? You guys are destroying the lake!’”
By Good’s estimation, Vermont could change the limit to two bass per day and it wouldn’t change the number of overall fish harvested per year at all. But so beloved are bass that Good openly admits a big part of his job is managing mindsets and expectations more than actual fisheries.
For example, there’s a specific lake in Vermont that he and his team figured had everything it needed to grow and sustain a balanced population of big bass, but the current population had become stunted. Years of surveys produced nothing bigger than 3 pounds, so Good came up with special regulations. For ten years, anglers were allowed to keep 10 bass per day within a slot limit. All ten could measure less than 10 inches, or you could keep one over 12 inches. Good went as far as to feature the lake on fishing TV shows, making the case that small bass bite through the ice and fry up just as tasty as 9-inch yellow perch, which anglers happily take home by the bucketload. The campaign failed miserably, and the lake never became the big-bass haven Good had envisioned.
An overall lack of excitement for bass on the table doesn’t help the situation — if anything, it’s the biggest excuse for not keeping them. Many devout bass freaks will claim they have no problem with people keeping largemouths, but they don’t simply because bass don’t taste good. Even folks who will gladly drop bluegill fillets in grease shy away from bass, which makes little sense because they are both sunfish. In 2021, Florida legalized the sale of farm-raised largemouths in fish markets, noting a 90 percent increase in the price per pound as demand spiked between 2013 and 2021. I’m not entirely sure who is creating this demand, but I do find it ironic that we’re farm raising a fish that could benefit from some thinning out in the wild. And the need for thinning will only increase because not only do anglers not want to eat bass. They also keep putting them where they don’t belong.
The More Dangerous “Bucket Brigade”
According to Good, no fish is illegally stocked in Vermont more frequently than largemouth bass. I don’t believe it would be too wild of a speculation to say that’s probably the case across most of the country. “Bucket biology” is far more prevalent than many people realize, including Good in his earlier years on the job.
“It happens way more than you think. I would say of all the lakes I survey annually, three to five will have a species that was never present before,” he said. “And keep in mind, we have records going back to the 1940s. But you can have a 10-acre pond out in the middle of the woods, a place you have to hike a mile to get to that’s completely disconnected. What’s in there all of a sudden? Largemouth bass.”
Good believes the illegal stockings are a direct result of people’s obsession with catching these fish. We simply want more of them in more places. That desire is so strong it clouds any thought of how devastating the introduction of a new fish to an ecosystem might be. In one of the most shocking examples, Good told me how much blowback he got for opting to manage a reservoir for walleyes. Vermont doesn’t have many great walleye waters, and he thought the public would be thrilled to have a place to catch these delicious fish.
“All I kept hearing was, ‘how come you’re stocking walleyes? You should be stocking smallmouth bass.’” Good says. “I told them yes, smallmouth would do great here, but there are about 57 lakes in every direction that have smallmouth bass.”
The walleyes did very well. Then, in 2012, Good conducted a shocking survey on the reservoir and turned up a juvenile smallmouth bass. By the end of the night, they had captured 40 of them. Twelve years later, the walleye fishery has crashed.
Nobody understands better than Shan O’Gorman just how difficult it is to undo the damage caused by overcrowding or throwing a system out of whack with bucket biology. What people don’t want to hear is that the fastest, most effective way to fix a broken bass lake is often to kill everything in it and start over. Managed correctly, O’Gorman says he can reestablish a healthy population of reproducing bass within three to four years.
Of course, that’s great for private water, but it happens very rarely with public water. Even if state agencies decided to kill off and rebuild certain lakes and ponds, will bass anglers listen the second time around? Maybe. Ngy is hopeful that his messaging about it being okay to kill some bass, and to not put every 2-pounder on a pedestal, is resonating with the next generation.
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“I think we’re making headway in the right direction,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of people engage with me in person, especially about how they’ve thought about it long and hard, did some level of their own research, and actually started harvesting some bass. The number one thing we need to do is to remove the stigma around keeping bass.”
Ngy is right. Getting people excited to eat more bass in the short term may be too big a hurdle. But getting the word out that the removal of some bass is beneficial — not detrimental — in most cases might open the door to a head change in the future. The future of quality bass fishing in the U.S. may depend on it. At a minimum, the next time you see an angler toss a bass in a bucket or slide it down a stringer, don’t let your feelings get hurt, because your love of that fish could be more harmful than having a few of them go into the oven.
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