The Fall Feeding Frenzy?

[J-Doc]

He's not lying, I've seen him stand there fishless for hours....just smiling like a retard on pudding day.

Who me???

Yep, I do that. :-)

PUDDIN'!!! lol

[Flysmallie]

He's not lying, I've seen him stand there fishless for hours....just smiling like a retard on pudding day.

Mongo like pudding.

[Greasy B]

I've seen a few feeding frenzies in October but no doubt mid summer is prime time. There are still some great reasons to fish and float in the fall. For me the biggest attraction is the lack of other boaters. My last two trips to jet boat central on the Meramec were great. 8-10 miles of river, no jet boats, no partiers, nobody. On the most recent trip the bass had moved out of much of the faster areas but the water was warm enough we had some great top water action. Yes we had to stop several times on the way back up to the ramp to clean leave from the intake but this was a small price to pay. This is turning into a month busy with non fishing obligations, if I had my way I would do an overnighter each weekend covering all the sections of the rivers that I'm forced to avoid all summer

[Gavin]

You can puzzle about it but the fish bite or they don't. Frenzy is when you find it. Not that often, more luck than anything you can control.

[Al Agnew]

Gavin, I agree, and maybe I wasn't using the right word. My point was that fall fish are supposed to feed more heavily than summer fish and get more active. But science would tell you that's not true. True feeding frenzies happen when they happen.

I'm pretty sure that as water temps drop the fish get less active, not more active. I liked the point made above that reservoir bass don't really get more active but are active in places where it's easier to fish for them. It's the accessibility of fall reservoir fish, not their activity levels, that makes fishing better in the fall.

But that's not true of stream bass. They actually get less accessible in the fall as they move to wintering pools and vacate a lot of the river that they were in all summer.

I'm also pretty sure that the whole idea of them "fattening up" for winter is false. For one thing, I don't know where you'd find fat on a bass. Bass are thick around the middle if they are developing eggs or have full stomachs. If they are living in a place where food is abundant and nutritious, their stomachs are always more or less full and they're always pretty thick around the middle. If they are thick across the back, it's muscle mass, not fat. In fact, I may be wrong but I don't think cold-blooded critters can store fat, or need to store fat. Since their metabolism is entirely dependent upon water temperature, the colder it gets the slower their metabolism and the less they need nourishment, so unlike warm-blooded animals that hibernate, they don't need stores of fat to nourish them during the winter. I think that as long as they go into the winter in good health, it doesn't much matter whether they are "fat" or "skinny".

The whole cold-blooded thing causes a lot of misconceptions. Conventional wisdom is that bass move to thermal refuges in the winter to "keep warmer". But if their body temperature is always the same as whatever the temperature of the water that surrounds them, how can they feel warmer or colder. We warm-blooded animals feel cold when the air is a lot cooler than our skin, but the water is always the same temperature as the bass's skin. I think bass move to thermal refuges like spring outlets because the warmer water speeds their metabolism enough to make it easier to escape predators, and has the added benefit of holding more food. But I think the wintering behavior of stream bass is driven the most by security. They either move to deeper water, or to heavy cover where they can hide completely, or to big pools where they have more room to hide, simply because they are less exposed to predators at a time when they are more sluggish and less able to escape.

[bfishn]

...I may be wrong but I don't think cold-blooded critters can store fat...

Catfish sure do.

[bfishn]

The paper linked below offers some insight. If you get a popup preview window, note especially the second page;

http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4612-0547-0_8#

...would like to read the whole thing...

Al, there's no doubt that temperature is the primary driver of fish metabolism, but biological factors play a part too, particularly egg/gonad development.

My simplified take is that fish in a particular environment that gets cold enough in winter to cause relative dormancy for that species will 'strap on the feedbag' for a brief period prior to the cold. For smallies, that would be in the northern states and Canada, where the bite just before iceover can be spectacular. I think this has been so often repeated that we tend to expect a "fall frenzy" throughout the range. As you noted, that quite often leaves us Ozark anglers disenchanted and doubting.

Added

I've been a sucker for the fall frenzy stories as often as anyone, but (except for flatheads) I've given it up. The pain is short now, and easily forgotten in December and January. When it gets so cold my guides freeze and I have to dunk my reel just to bring in a hog 'eye or striper, I just think about those poor yanks with their tipups and chuckle.

[Al Agnew]

Yeah, I'd like to read the whole thing, too, but not enough to pay for it. My own quick Google search gleaned a few interesting tidbits...

1. Fish apparently do not store fat as saturated fat (which would end up being the semi-solid fat we see in a good beefsteak) because in cold water that kind of fat would simply get too hard in a cold blooded critter and they'd be unable to move. Their fat is stored as oil. In the case of catfish, a lot of the fat is stored in adipose tissue and under the skin as oil in a tissue matrix. I would assume something similar is the case with bass, the fat being also stored in organs like the liver (cod liver oil, anyone?). At any rate, while bass may be able to store some oil by feeding heavily, they are still limited to some extent by the temperature of the water as to how actively they can feed.

In the case of Ozark stream bass, they don't have to survive completely dormant but for short periods during the winter, so don't need to store oil to get them through...they can feed enough to fuel their sluggish winter metabolism.

It seems to me, though, that all other things being equal, a bass would rather feed and be a little more active than not, which is why they seem to seek out sunny, rocky banks in the winter to "soak up some sun" and get a little warmer and more active (or go to spring outlet areas).

There is also still the question of why bigger fish seem more active than smaller ones during the winter. The percentage of bigger fish caught is much greater in the winter, though overall numbers of fish caught are usually much smaller. Maybe the bigger fish are able to metabolize more efficiently and soak up more heat from the sun than smaller ones?

[bfishn]

...

In the case of Ozark stream bass, they don't have to survive completely dormant but for short periods during the winter, so don't need to store oil to get them through...they can feed enough to fuel their sluggish winter metabolism...

Exactly that ^^^

I haven't looked inside a bass in years (), but I've cleaned scores of Bella Vista channel cat with huge stores of gut fat in the cavity. More from one 15lber than you could hold in both hands. (Best bait for crawdad traps ever!) The muscle on their backs was marbled with translucent fat too. Had to trim it or you'd gag...

Big fish in winter? I just accept that's how it's s'posed to be... ;-)

[jdmidwest]

As far as the "fattening up" is concerned, I think it is usually confused with stuffing their gut and distended stomachs. Most fall bass feeding will be spitting stuff out as you reel them in as they have been on a feeding frenzy taking advantage of a warm, mid day feeding. Then they kick back and digest, slowly as the metabolizm decreases with the temp.

The increased activity is usually mid day in the fall. No need to get an early start or stay late. 10-3 can be some hot fishing in the October month. And topwater works well.