Growing up in the Lowcountry, I always looked forward to early summer, the best time to fly fish for bass on my family’s farm pond outside Furman, South Carolina, and near the Hampton and Jasper County line.
In the evenings and until dark, my dad and I paddled around our six-acre pond in a small aluminum boat, swatting mosquitos and casting our lines along the bank, anticipating the next strike from our opportunistic quarry.
My favorite fly to use for bass is a popping bug, a type of fly which skirts across the surface of the water, mimicking a waking insect, spider, frog, or even a mouse or baby bird! Largemouth Bass are veracious predators, foraging on almost anything that swims – or falls into – the warm and slow-moving rivers and ponds they call home.
Largemouth Bass and other predatory fish are stocked by anglers across the world. But did you know that stocking fish in wetland environments can decimate populations of dragonflies and amphibians?
Research by Hecnar & M’Closky (1997) found that presence of predatory fish across 178 ponds in Canada significantly reduced amphibian species richness. Likewise, Witmer et. al (2010) sampled 24 lakes in Sweden and found that predatory fish abundance correlated to fewer dragonflies and damselflies in lakes and ponds.
