Big Indiana Bass

Have you ever wondered why you rarely, if ever, see largemouth bass fillets sitting in your grocer's fish section? Beside the arguable fact that they don't taste as good as catfish, perch or walleye, it really comes down to a matter of economics. A just published study** in the Journal of the World Aquaculture Society sheds some insight on the topic. 

The 2-year study was carried out by stocking bass (largemouth) fingerlings into small ponds at rates of 2500, 5000, or 7500 fish/acre. As you might expect, yields from these ponds increased as stocking density increased. Survival rates of the bass averaged ~65–74%, largely attributed to density. The bass fed best at water temperatures of 80-86 F. Harvested bass were fat and chunky, weighing much above fish of the same size that you'd typically catch in the wild. 

Now for the gory details. A whole-dressed bass (remove head, guts and some fins) yielded 61–62% of the original fish weight; in other words, you lose over 1/3 of the fishes weight by doing this. A shank fillet, basically your traditional fillet minus the belly meat or "nugget" as it's referred to, yielded 34–35%. Thought of another way, if you catch and fillet a 3 pound bass, you'll likely end up with about 1-pound of "meat." All kinds of fun math you can now do with those numbers.

The real bottom line came down to production costs, which ran between $3.30-$4.25/lb. for largemouth. This is what makes the fillet market for bass a rather unlikely prospect. For comparison sake, some recent figures I saw to produce a channel catfish were in the $0.55-$0.60/lb. range for live delivered fish, about 5-7 times cheaper. The catfish farmer typically got anywhere from $0.05 to $0.25 per pound margin depending on economies of scale - not a giant profit. Now consider that your typical grocery store sells the finished filleted product (catfish) at about $5.00/lb., and some simple math will tell you that the final cost to the consumer for largemouth bass fillets would be considerably higher. I actually had a conversation with a colleague at work who told me that some international food markets do sell live (or freshly killed) bass, with the going rate of about $10 per pound or more. Sounds like I might need to open up an urban pay lake for bass.

** Engle, C. R., Stone, N. and Xie, L. (2013), Feasibility of Pond Production of Largemouth Bass, Micropterus salmoides, for a Filet Market. Journal of the World Aquaculture Society, 44: 805–813. doi: 10.1111/jwas.12076