I have a couple of questions about relocating bass from one body of water to another. I just found out about a body of water that had 8 large female bass (farm raised) put in it recently. The questions are: Do the bass take a while to get adjusted to the new surroundings before they start feeding? How soon will these bass start feeding aggressively?

I only know of one bit of info regarding this. Doug Hannon tried releasing large bass (>10#) he caught and tagged into other water bodies, and found that they were caught and killed pretty quickly.

He attributed this to the fact that he feels exceptionally large bass are large because they are aggressive feeders, and less vulnerable to angling where they grew up. When released into new water, they were still aggressive, and being displaced, became vulnerable to angling. Hannon says he stopped relocating bass because of this.

Hmmm...I seem to remember research on relocated bass..tournaments I think...where some bass became roamers, never settling down into any location. Whether this was their habit before capture is an obvious question. A number of telemetry studies have shown that some bass (not relocated ones) are roamers.

how did the 10 pounders die?  was it from stress or people keeping them?

Ron, my experience with this is that we transported almost 200 F-1 brood fish from one 50 acre lake to the another over a period of 1 mth. The folks who were fishing the recipient lake during this period (catch and release only) said that the fishing improved within the first week.

Big O