I have never kept a bass in my 31 years of fishing. My grandpa and dad both taught me to always catch and release. I'm really wanting a good answer as to why it is so frowned upon to keep and harvest bass. I am almost strictly a bass fisherman, but all I see is people catching and keeping limits of crappie and sand bass. I will always catch and release, strictly because that is what I was taught to do, but I am honestly just looking for some thoughts on why this thought seems to pertain to bass only. I guess what I'm getting at is how is it that sand bass and crappie are able to be kept and harvested in what seems to be very large volumes, but still remain, whereas it feels like everyone seems to think bass will disappear from a lake if harvested consistently. Thanks for any input!
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I’ve never seen anyone frown upon keeping Bass in general. Most are simply against keeping the larger females.

I will keep a few for a meal from time to time, but rarely keep a fish over 2-3 lbs and typically keep a few small fish when fishing lakes where catching 40-50 small fish a day is pretty common.

True. Thanks for the answer. I guess we have been around different people. I've had people my whole life talk down on keeping any bass at any time lol. I see you're in Snyder. I'm from Big Spring. Love lake Thomas!

The only people that I tend to see that are catch and release anglers are tournament guys. I hate the taste of fish, so I throw mine back, even crappie/catfish/drum, they get chunked back in.

But my family was completely opposite of yours, if it got caught, they kept it.

Crappie and sands basically never need to be stock released into lakes and some lake always have good numbers of harvest ones and are quicker to mature and spawn.....florida bass on the other hand are frequently stocked by tpwd to keep numbers up....fork and murvaul are difficult to harvest black bass as there is a slot limit...crappie are the best mildest tasting fish..sand bass fillets when clean have muscles fibers close to the skin that is very fishy tasting and needs to be cut off fillet...black bass on the other hand is my second favorite bc they are larger and do not contain that layer of fishy muscle just below the skin and are much easier to clean than catfish...although you can only keep 5 of them normally..so it's a trade off...and I also never keep black bass over about 3lbs or spawning bc I also love the sport...

Keeping the 1 to 1 1/2 pounders will benefit the fishery.

Larger fish are breeders and smaller ones are food for the big ones.

Finally. A 45 fish bag limit! What lake pray tell?

Nothing wrong with bass, they are a hell of alot better than sand bass.

Catch and release is something that started to get ingrained into the offspring of the guys back in the mid to late seventies when tournament fishing started to take hold, and I guess you could thank Ray Scott, and those early tournament icons, who found out they could make money off of the LMB fishery, all in the name of conservation.
That was a good thing I suppose, with the growth in popularity of competitive bass fishing, and as money being made by the boat, lure, and other equipment manufacturers skyrocketed.

Back when I started bass fishing back in the early seventies, tournaments were in their infancy,
around the late sixties and seventies.
15 bass stringers and 12" limit.

The club I belonged to, one of the very first would keep the fillets from our monthly tournaments and then have a big fish fry.

Nowadays, though legal, try walking up to a fish cleaning table with a couple of stringers of bass, and throw them onto the table and watch the dirty looks, and possibly smart arse remarks, and someone searching for a rope and looking for a big oak tree.

The issue is carrying capacity and predator-prey relationships. These concepts along, with the aggressive nature of largemouth bass make management techniques important for the health of the species. In general, you can manage a waterbody for different goals. If you want big fish you harvest a different way then if you want lots of fish. Harvesting fish is actually needed to maximize management goals. That is why the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department places specific harvest regulations on certain lakes. Harvesting largemouth bass within the legal limits will actually push the lakes closer to the desired goals.

Harvesting sub 2lb fish here and there doesn't hurt most fisheries in my opinion. If everyone started harvesting fish we'd probably have a problem though given there are 35 million bass anglers in this country. Fortunately most practice catch and release. My question is why anyone would want to eat a bass? Lots of much better tasting fish out there in my opinion. If I want to eat fish I chase the species that make better table fare.

It's been many, many years since I've filleted a bass, but honestly I grew up eating them 3-4 dinners per week as we were dirt poor- but knew how to catch bass pretty well. Of course the creel limit (It was 15 per when I was a kid) was much higher back then, but the bass of Lake Palestine provided thousands of meals for my family for no more than a few bucks in gas per trip.
We would fish for crappie a couple of times per year, but honestly could limit pretty easily back then on bass resulting in much more weight in fillets. My $.02

Actually bass are tasty much better than whites or hybrids.
Don’t see a problem with people eating a bass .
J D

I grew up eating bass. Tournament fishing started when I was in my teens, and even then most of the fish caught died as we didn't have the live wells and stuff to keep them alive much longer than after the weigh in. Fast forward to today and I don't keep LMB, but I will take out some white bass and crappie. Back in Georgia, I ate some Spots on occasion as they are more of a schooling fish than LM, but its as much for the hassle of cleaning them that I don't eat more.

Bass taste great and agree they are much better than whites.