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If food is plentiful and easy to catch, bass get fat and chunky but still 30% to 50% go a day or more without food, depending upon season. Some miss meals. Bass are not consummate eating machines. Their meals are not guaranteed. As a result they use life strategies that conserve energy, usually actively feeding only at times when they are likely to be successful. They wait in inactive status until feeding chances are good.

In rare times when prey are overly abundant and vulnerable, bass may seem to gorge, but it's likely only because they have evolved no mechanism to tell them they're full and turn off the feeding urge as soon as they are full.
Creatures only develop instinctive behaviors when circumstances are routine. Too much food is rare for bass.

6. Do bass seek places with optimum temperature, pH, oxygen conditions and maximum numbers of prey?  People selling meters, gauges, and gadgets like to make it seem that bass can be found by locating some ideal or "preferred" set of conditions. And sometimes they can be.

But there is no evidence bass are psychic. They only know what they have experienced and can remember. They have no way of knowing that things are better somewhere else unless they go there. Wandering fish may stop if they encounter better conditions, but most bass don't go looking for better
conditions until or unless things go sour where they are.

Bass move when conditions go out of tolerance: the pH becomes too acid, oxygen drops below 3 ppm, water warms over 95o F, or so few prey remain in their local area that the bass go several days without food. Bass stop searching for new hunting zones as soon as the find condition that meet their minimum requirements. It's part of their need to conserve energy.  If they didn't do this, they'd move continuously, always searching for someplace better.

Optimum conditions concentrate bass already in that area that encounter the conditions during normal local movements. Shad and fresh water inflows only attract fish already nearby. Bass at the dam stay near the dam, unless they find no food there.  Oxygen, pH, light, and other meters may be useful to
identify conditions too extreme to let bass stay in an area, but they usually won't find fish for you.

However, a wall of bad conditions concentrates fish by blocking movement and forcing bass away from poor conditions. Thus water clarity-clines, bad-pH clines, and thermoclines can sometimes concentrate local fish.

7. Do bass routinely move from deep water sanctuaries to the shallows to feed? Tracking and diving studies have repeatedly shown bass tend to stay at the same depth hour after hour and day after day. Moreover, some bass are found at almost all habitable depths at the same time.

Movements are basically horizontal, not vertical. Bass do make small up and down depth shifts and will dash briefly upward for several feet to attack prey. but changing pressure in the gas bladder prevents daily movement from 15 feet or more to the shallows and back. Bass stop vertical movements short
of the point they feel pain or lose control of their buoyancy.

A bass at 10 feet can feed continuously at and near the surface. A bass at twenty feet can only dash up and back to the surface, while bass deeper than about 20 feet can't move to and stay near the surface without bladder problems. When some bass are caught in the 5-10 foot range and later more are taken at a depth of 30 feet, it is more likely that two groups of bass have been
located than that one group has shifted depth. Bass migrations from deep water to shallows and back are seasonal, not daily, events.

8. Are bass "ambush" predators? The word ambush is used to describe bass feeding to the exclusion of most other terms in almost every fishing magazine and TV show. Never

theless, ambush is a poor description of the way active bass feed. Bass move when they feed actively. They don't hide and wait for prey. You can see this for yourself over and over again in most underwater bass videos.

Scientists (Dr. Edmund Hobson and others) describe five different tactics used by predator fish and provide examples:
    1. Ambush ---- sculpin, halibut
    2. Stalking ---- barracuda
    3. Habituation ---- Grouper
    4. Run-down ---- Tuna
    5. Generalist (use all tactics as appropriate) -- pike and black bass

Bass best match the GENERALIST CATEGORY, bass bodies and colors are designed
to hunt by moving in search of prey and are poorly designed to ambush. The are not camouflaged in great detail, don't look like vegetation or the bottom, and are good swimmers (unlike true ambush specialists -halibut,
anglerfish, or sculpin).

Bass in large active schools or aggregations use the run-down tactic. Smaller groups move in stops and starts along or under cover edges, looking at the cover to see if prey are emerging.  They then  actively stalk, flush, and run-down prey they surprise. Neutral bass suspend or slowly drift about in the open near concentration of preyfish, habituating the prey to their presence until one carelessly lets the bass get too close. Finally, inactive, possibly digesting, bass hover or suspend in cave-like cover or under cover looking out into open areas. They may dash out of the edge of cover to capture prey that blunder too close. This is the only time bass actually may be considered to be using ambush tactics.

Several studies have shown bass inside cover are ineffective hunters. Cover gets in their way, shortens their strike range, and hides targets. If forced by inescapable, thick cover to hunt using only the ambush tactic, most bass would starve. Cover is called "cover" because it is a good place for preyfish to hide and escape from larger fish like bass.

The belief that bass ambush confuses the

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