It turns out, largemouth bass love an octopus meal.
When most people think of largemouth bass forage, the first things that come to mind are probably crayfish, shiners, bluegill, and frogs. However, the largemouth has earned a ferocious reputation for being a true eating machine that will chomp down anything and everything that looks even slightly enticing.
It turns out, it does not even matter if no other bass has ever seen the meal being presented to it because it is a saltwater species.
YouTuber Milliken Fishing has a pet largemouth bass that is so aggressive, it is isolated in a tank all by itself. The bass attacks anything and everything that gets near the tank. This got these guys curious. Would a bass eat saltwater seafood? More specifically, would a bass eat squid and octopus? They headed to a local market and came home with some frozen seafood to find out.
We always knew that bass were aggressive, but there is something about watching a small bass devour a tentacle more than twice its length that puts things in a whole new light. We had no idea a bass could even swallow a meal that large. To top it off, the thing was still hungry and readily ate some small chunks of frozen squid too.
Saltwater or freshwater, it does not seem to matter. A meal is a meal to a largemouth bass. Even though a bass has never seen an octopus tentacle twisting and curling in the current before, it still recognized it as a potential food item and quickly wolfed it down.
For that matter, so did the rest of the fish and even the snapping turtle that were presented with the unique meal. This has the gears churning in our heads a little bit wondering if you can successfully use some types of saltwater lures in freshwater. Based on the results of this experiment, it seems like it would. We may have to do some experimenting of our own on the lake this season!
For more outdoor content from Travis Smola, be sure to follow him on Twitter and check out his Geocaching and Outdoors with Travis YouTube channels.
NEXT: PETA IS NOW GOING AFTER FISHERMEN
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