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The Life Cycle of the Bass

The bass is a fish of slow growth. It attains a fairly large average size only because it appears to have a much longer ‘expectation of life’ than the generality of sea fishes.

Michael Kennedy,The Sea Angler’s Fishes, 1954

ML  In the clear, cold waters of the English Channel, the first hint of the spring bloom of microscopic plants was staining the sea with a translucent, greenish tinge. The surface of the sea, untroubled by wind or rain, was swelling gently into deep oily dunes of water as it rounded the rugged, cliff-bound peninsula. As the tide began to flood towards the east, powerful eddies and surges broke upwards from the seabed pinnacles to boil on the surface of the race.

Half a mile north of the lighthouse, perched like a sentinel on the prominent rock, and twenty feet beneath the rolling swell, a school of grey-backed, silver-sided fish stemmed the powerful flow, seemingly with no effort. All the fish in the school were thickset male bass in the prime of life. The largest of them was over 8lb, but the majority were small fish of less than 4lb; all were now in breeding condition.

It was now the first week in May and the water was warm for the time of year. This followed a mild spell of weather which had lasted since Christmas. The male bass had been shoaled up, patiently waiting in the tide race, for almost two weeks. They fed, when the opportunity arose, on scattered shoals of tiny sandeels.

Suddenly a sense of excitement rippled through the assembled fish as a group of grey shapes loomed up from below. The largest of these newcomers was well into double figures and their flanks bulged with eggs, accumulated in the summer of the previous year. The excitement rose as the females entered the shoal and the male fish jostled and pressed around them, mouths agape and bodies quivering as their milt was released. Streams of tiny amber eggs issued from the hen fish and most of them were fertilised as they dispersed and drifted slowly up towards the surface of the sea. As quickly and as silently as they had arrived, the larger bass disappeared and the shoal of males settled once more to their silent wait.

In the following four or five days the fertilised eggs were carried to and fro on the tidal streams. Many of them became suspended in the cycling currents over the banks of shell-grit which lay on either side of the race. The vulnerable microscopic amber beads fell prey to a host of tiny, transparent, pulsing jellyfish, bristly, twitching copepods, fierce, spiky crab larvae and the fry of lesser fish such as rocklings. As the eggs drifted, they developed within them muscles, bones, nerves and little black eyes. By early June the tiny fish were visible, curled tightly inside thei