The Finger Lakes are infested with Palegic baitfish, but chautaugua on the other hand is one of the few New York lakes that has not been hit with the palegic baitfish infestation. The fish were gorging on perch and craws when I was there last fall. One awesome thing that goes with not having palegic baitfish is that the smallies feed in shallow year round so you can easily reach them with normal presentations...you can go down an 8ft weedline in midsummer flippin a jig and hit 4-5lb smallies and largemouths alike...thats a dream lake as far as Im concerned

OK, I hope I'm not pulling this thread off topic too much, but, so many topics just get me thinking...at least it's somewhat relevant

I think there's something useful in this FAT smallie thing. In comparing LM and SM I'm wondering if this isn't another view into the relative efficiencies of each. That the playing field for both are not "even" or comparable in some linear way. LMs are more stingy with their energy, and smallies less so -built with dash speed and can exploit open water prey that occur in denser numbers. Is the SM the derived form??

I have a pond with SM, surrounded by similar ponds with LM, where vegetation (milfoil) based bluegills are the primary forage. It's basically a LM fishery if you just looked at it. The smallies here have to hunt bluegills amongst vegetation! They reach good length (20"), but are all thin -to a fish. There is an apparent efficiency issue there, for the smallies. I'm waiting to see if there's a time of year where they get fat -like I see in most LM fisheries.

For LM, in "indigenous" habitat, it seems to take a very special set of circumstances to provide such growth, and one I think is more easily perturbed by human imfluence, i.e. eutrophication (which, in many larger open water bodies can actually inc SM growth).

Anyway, just throwing it out there.

CONGRATS TUCKMAN,

                        I thought for sure that one would have broken 7. What a big smallie...Anytime you have an open seat and need a partner, look me up...LOL

OK, I hope I'm not pulling this thread off topic too much, but, so many topics just get me thinking...at least it's somewhat relevant

I think there's something useful in this FAT smallie thing. In comparing LM and SM I'm wondering if this isn't another view into the relative efficiencies of each. That the playing field for both are not "even" or comparable in some linear way. LMs are more stingy with their energy, and smallies less so -built with dash speed and can exploit open water prey that occur in denser numbers. Is the SM the derived form??

I have a pond with SM, surrounded by similar ponds with LM, where vegetation (milfoil) based bluegills are the primary forage. It's basically a LM fishery if you just looked at it. The smallies here have to hunt bluegills amongst vegetation! They reach good length (20"), but are all thin -to a fish. There is an apparent efficiency issue there, for the smallies. I'm waiting to see if there's a time of year where they get fat -like I see in most LM fisheries.

For LM, in "indigenous" habitat, it seems to take a very special set of circumstances to provide such growth, and one I think is more easily perturbed by human imfluence, i.e. eutrophication (which, in many larger open water bodies can actually inc SM growth).

Anyway, just throwing it out there.

Paul I have tried to raise smallies in one of our deeper(20ft)ponds and it seems smallies that just dont seem to do very in well in ponds esp. competing with largemouth...On the other hand one of my friends put one big smallie in his pond full of small largemouth and it became the dominate fish and grew very huge in very short time...

My own thought on this is that smallies are better at adapting to the environment around thier prey(nomadic foragers), while largemouths are better at adapting to the prey around thier environment.(opportunity foragers)

I'm sure there is way more to it than that tho

My own thought on this is that smallies are better at adapting to the environment around thier prey(nomadic foragers), while largemouths are better at adapting to the prey around thier environment.(opportunity foragers)

Interesting way of looking at it.

Many small lakes here in KS have both large and smallmouth bass.  Its a matter of having habitat to accomodate both of them.  The lakes where both species are successful tend to have areas that are mostly rock and areas that are mostly weeds.  If there's abundant coontail though, all bets are off.  Smallmouth will hunt shad around the edges and largemouth will eat bluegills in the matted stuff.  There's one small lake here (~200 acres) where the lake record smallie is 5.8 pounds and the lake record largemouth is 7.6.  Both huge fish by Kansas standards.  On the other hand, big Milford (which got a bad rap from the Fed tournament but is actually a nice fishery), the habitat is mostly rock and the smallies dominate the largemouth completely there.  Its all habitat based.  

Here's a write-up of a trip to the above mentioned pond:

http://www.bassresource.com/bass_fishing_forums/YaBB.pl?num=1213965803/0#0

In it I rattle on some about bass feeding behavior, but really am describing LM behavior more than that of SM.

I chatted with Ralph Manns a bit about the FAT smallie idea and he wondered if it doesn't have something to do with the fact that SM were originally a riverine species, and LM lacustrine (still water), and wht we see in some present day smallies is the energetic difference stillwater environments provide SM. Pure speculation, but interesting.

Man they are hard to juge by a picture. I would say between 6-6 to 7-2