Photo by Ron Sinfelt.

Largemouth bass are Kentucky’s most popular and sought-after game fish species. Simply put, more anglers enjoy bass fishing and spend more time each year trying to catch bucketmouths than any other kind of fish.

To make sure this particular outdoor pursuit continues to be possible, Kentucky’s Department of Fish and Wildlife Resources (KDFWR) employs biologists to monitor and study every aspect of a bass population.

Typically, these studies result in a recommendation to control the harvest of bass in both numbers and sizes on a given waterway.

“Overharvesting” is a pretty bad word to an agency that’s legally mandated to keep fishery resources sustained year after year.

Putting some restrictions on the use of a public resource -- and then enforcing those restrictions -- seems a plausible way to satisfy the user and to conserve the fishery resource at the same time. Each waterway is unique, biologists say, so applying a single, uniform creel and size limit to largemouths or smallmouths everywhere will not produce the best fishery each lake can have.

“So in Kentucky, we take a more tailored approach,” said black bass research biologist Ryan Oster. “We assess our waters individually, and use factors like fishing pressure, fertility, historical performance, growth and survival rates and angler attitudes to determine a plan for our reservoirs, rivers and streams.

“Obviously, not every lake is the same in terms of those characteristics. So to use the same management strategy would not be as productive,” he said. “Today’s science can do better than that.”

In Kentucky, two regulatory fishing size limits are used primarily for managing bass populations, and have worked pretty well in most cases. They are the standard 12-inch minimum-size limit and the 15-inch minimum-size limit.

Occasionally, a bass fishery may need to be manipulated even more, which is where slot limits and trophy management or total catch-and-release approaches are used. We’ll discuss those in some detail shortly.

First, let’s touch on the most common way to regulate black bass.

The 12-inch limit is used on lakes, rivers, streams and ponds when recruitment is generally good each year, and the bass population is holding its own from season to season.

“The basic idea is to protect the male and female bass for at least one spawning cycle before those fish become eligible for harvest,” explained Oster. “This just ensures we are keeping fish in there to sustain the population, and the resource remains viable into the future.”

Herrington Lake is one example where the 12-inch size limit is used. Known to some as the “bass factory,” Herrington has good production and recruitment, plus a well-balanced largemouth population of younger bass and mature bass. Catch rates are good and remain stable, and the harvest of legal fish doesn’t negatively impact the chance to come up with some very good bass.

When a 15-inch minimum is used for bass, Oster says the lake tends to have really good spawns only every three or four years, which is common. In order to keep fish in the population to ensure good spawns when those conditions are right, they must be protected a little longer.

In most waters, it takes a bass about three years to reach 15 inches, but they become reproductively mature sooner than that. A bass that’s 3 to 4 years old may spawn two, perhaps three times. Therefore, even if conditions for reproduction are bad a year or two in a row, the population can still sustain itself.