NJFishing.com Your Best Online Source for Fishing Information in New Jersey - Petition to stop new MCR time restrictions

Off topic but I'm going to say it anyway which I'm sure will cause debate. Never made sense to me running bass tournaments when largemouth and smallmouth bass are spawning. Why schedule tournaments when fish are at their most vulnerable and who knows how many eggs are destroyed by pulling fish off their beds allowing panfish to eat the eggs or disrupting the spawning process. The obvious answer is that's when big females are most vulnerable but it's for that very same reason tournaments should never be run during the spawn in my opinion. And if the male is pulled off the bed after the female drops its eggs, the entire nest will be destroyed which makes no sense whatsoever.

I witnessed something the other day I've never witnessed before. I watched from a distance a smallmouth guarding a nest where eggs had obviously been dropped. Sunnies and bluegills were lined up attacking the nest and the small mouth was fending them off. About 10 minutes into watching this, a largemouth bass actually joined the smallmouth and the two of them worked side by side chasing panfish from the nest. Never saw that before and it was a pretty amazing sight to see. I don't know if in this particular lake the largemouths and smallies were forming a hybrid species or if it was just an anomaly of two different male species guarding the nest. Either way, it was a sight to see. Nature at its finest, pretty cool.