Anglers Say Bass Fishing Got Worse Around 2005. A New Study Backs That Up.

If it feels like bass fishing on your home lake isn't what it used to be, a new study out of eastern Ontario says a lot of anglers are reporting the exact same thing. Researchers asked anglers to recall how their bass fishing changed across time periods stretching from 1975 to 2025, and the pattern in what people remember is remarkably consistent: fewer bass, smaller bass, and a turn for the worse that most of them place right around 2005.

What Anglers Are Reporting

The study asked Largemouth Bass and Smallmouth Bass anglers on eastern Ontario lakes to recall changes in their catch across different time periods between 1975 and 2025. Across most of those periods, respondents reported declining numbers and body sizes in their catch, with sharp declines beginning in 2005. That pattern held up regardless of which lake someone fished or whether they were a tournament angler or a weekend regular. The researchers describe respondents as anglers who overwhelmingly perceive that the "quality of bass fishing in eastern Ontario has deteriorated" over the decades covered by the survey.

That's a strong statement for a fishery most anglers would call healthy on paper. Bass are still stocked in plenty of minds as a resilient, forgiving species. This study is a reminder that resilient doesn't mean immune to change.

What actually surprised me reading this one is how consistent the picture came out. Ask a room full of anglers to compare notes on a lake and you usually get an argument, not a consensus. Getting the same read on numbers, the same read on size, and the same rough turning point out of tournament regulars and weekend anglers alike is not the outcome I'd have guessed going in.

How They Asked

The method here is worth understanding before you weigh the findings. Researchers used something called the Life History Calendar approach: instead of counting fish themselves, they had anglers recall and organize their own fishing history across specific time periods. The researchers frame the approach as a way to put local ecological knowledge to work assessing a fishery that's otherwise data-limited.

The Catch

This is angler memory, not an electrofishing survey. Nobody was out counting fish with a boat and a shocker across five decades on these lakes. What you're looking at is a large, consistent pattern of self-reported recollection, which is genuinely valuable data and also a different kind of evidence than a population count. Recall isn't perfect, and a bad year or a slow month can color how someone remembers a whole decade. The consistency across different lakes and different types of anglers is what makes this worth paying attention to. One study, using one method, on lakes in one region isn't the same as a verdict on bass fishing everywhere.

What This Means When You're Picking Water

I hold the largemouth record at my family's cabin lake in the UP. It's mounted on a wall covered in family catches going back five generations, and I beat my grandpa's old mount by a quarter inch to get there. That kind of multi-generational history is exactly the setup where a family would notice a change in a lake's bass fishing over time, whether or not one has actually happened there. I haven't fished the lakes in this study and I'm not going to pretend a Michigan cabin lake tells you anything about eastern Ontario. But the core idea, that anglers who know a piece of water over decades are carrying real information about how it's changing, rings true to me. It's my own read, not something the study claims beyond its own survey population, but if you fish the same lake year after year, your memory of how the fishing used to be is worth taking seriously.

That's also a reason I lean toward releasing the biggest bass you catch rather than keeping every one that makes the boat. If you're newer to targeting largemouth specifically, our largemouth bass fishing guide is a good place to start before you're the one keeping decades of notes on a home lake.

Citation

Zhang, J., Philipp, D. P., Claussen, J. E., Suski, C. D., Nguyen, V. M., Young, N., LaRochelle, L., Lombardo, J. W., & Cooke, S. J. (2026). Local Angler Knowledge Reveals Declines in Fishing Quality for Black Bass in Lakes of Eastern Ontario. Fisheries Management and Ecology, 33(3), 568-590. https://doi.org/10.1111/fme.70043