Fig 1.
Lure types consisting of crank baits (a) and ‘wacky-rigged’ soft plastic baits (b) used to catch largemouth bass and rock bass in the wild.
Crank baits included both diving lures and lipless surface lures equipped with rattles from several manufacturers and varied in colour, retrieve technique as well as level of water disturbance and motion paths (representative example: Rapala, Rattlin’ Rapala “fire tiger”, image credit: bassproshop.com). Soft plastic baits included a range of naturally coloured worms from two manufacturers and were allowed to sink and retrieved slowly (representative example: Gary Yamamoto Custom Baits-Yamasenko “pumpkin”, image credit: modified from heartlandoutdoors.com).
Fig 2.
Schematic representation of the in-lake experimental arena tank used to quantify aspects of largemouth bass and rock bass personality including refuge emergence time, flight-initiation-distance, general activity and latency-to-recapture with a net.
Table 1.
PCA loadings of within-context behavioural variables used to generate a first principal component score (PC1) for boldness in rock bass and largemouth bass.
Table 2.
Output from Cox proportional hazard regression for latency-to-exit refuge for Largemouth Bass and Rock Bass captured via angling using crank baits or soft plastic baits.
Table 3.
Output from mixed models of Largemouth Bass and Rock bass behavioural metrics by lure type and body size (Total Length).
The table shows the response metric, the model terms, F- and P-value. Significant model terms are shown as italicized (α = 0.5).
Table 4.
Summary of means ± standard errors for raw values of behavioural and morphological attributes of Largemouth Bass and Rock Bass used in the current study.
All traits listed are significantly different between species (F = 7.24–156.1; P < 0.008).
Fig 3.
Proportion of fish exiting refuge (latency-to-exit) during behaviour trials for (A) Largemouth Bass (grey) and Rock Bass (black) caught with crank baits (solid lines) and soft plastic baits (dashed lines) as well as (B) proportion of large (>20cm Rock Bass, >30cm Largemouth Bass; grey) and small fish (<20cm Rock Bass, <30cm Largemouth Bass; black) caught with crank baits (solid lines) and soft plastic baits (dashed lines) that exited the refuge.