When do largemouth bass spawn in mississippi

They do not eat during spawning or when the water temperature is below 5 degrees or above 37 degrees. TITLE 3. State fish. The largemouth bass Micropterus salmoides is hereby designated the state fish of Mississippi. Sources: Laws, , ch. Symbols Histories Timelines Famous People. Mississippi State State Fishes Natural Resources Agencies. Male largemouth bass, when preparing to spawn will fan or spread out a nest to help protect the eggs when they are fertilized.

When the eggs hatch the fry will remain in the nest for protection. When the fry reach 1. As a result, they have been stocked throughout the U. Enter Search Term s :. Therefore flip the cover with jigs and worms. If you're getting bit but not hooking up, you're probably attracting bedding bass that are just moving the bait, but not taking it. Use gitzits to catch bass off beds. When a bass angles down to your bait on a bed, watch his pectoral fins.

Use bright baits on beds because bass don't care about the color. You need to see the bait and the strike so use a bright color. Use a 5 inch reaper when bluegill are spawning usually during and just after bass spawn. If the beds are empty, fish points and drop-offs near flats and search for suspended bass. Post spawn bass typically are tough to catch.

They spend the first two weeks after the spawn recooperating. After that, they start feeding again. Post spawn generally doesn't happen to an entire lake or at the same time due to differences in water temperature. Use a topwater bait such as a Zara Spook, even if they're 20 feet deep.

Bass will also suspend under floating docks and log booms just after the spawn. Use a jerkbait, then use a jig on the second pass. As the water temperature climbs into the 80s or 90s, largemouths must conserve their metabolic energy, and will move around less.

Look for them to associate strongly with cover in feet of water, where they can hold and ambush prey. Reservoir and lake bass move off-shore to deeper channel ledges, points, open water rockpiles and drop-offs, where they await schools of baitfish and intercept them as they pass.

Just how deep they go depends on particular factors of each lake or reservoir - current, structure, temperature, oxygen, and availability of food. The larger fish tend to go into deeper waters, while the smaller fish may stay in relatively shallow areas. Even in the heat of midsummer, however, bass often return to shallow waters to feed in the early morning, evening, and late hours. Even so, they are rarely found in shallow waters in the middle of the day, especially when the sun is bright and the wind is calm.

You might want to develop a consistent method for measuring water temperature so you can predict the spawn in future years. For example, note the temperature in the main lake early in the morning when the bass spawn first starts.

It might be different from the to degree range, but it will be a good predictor in years to come. Largemouth bass build nests — shallow depressions that can be 1 to 2 feet in diameter — on hard bottom. The nests are built on clean gravel, hard sand or clay — or they might be in an area where bass can fan away silt to get to hard bottom. Yes, bass will spawn on the thick tubers of water lilies to have a hard surface in an area with an otherwise soft bottom. A nest will be adjacent to a single object like a stump, log, dock piling or rock if available.

Nesting near a large object makes it easier to guard against intruders with an appetite for bass eggs and larvae. Conversely nests are not built near complex cover like brush piles that would make detection of nest predators more difficult. The male courts the female to attract her to the nest and stimulate her to spawn. This might involve a little dancing and nipping.

On the nest, the male might nudge or nip the female near the vent or gill cover, presumably to stimulate egg release. The female leaves after she has spawned, and the male guards the eggs.

Nest guarding by both the male and female biparental guarding has been documented for a bass population in a North Carolina stream but is infrequent in other studied populations.