I'd like to chime in here. I was initially worried about what Rex presented in his first post in this thread. I thought we'd stock tilapia into a bass-heavy pond, they would reproduce prolifically, bass would grow, tilapia would die in the fall and the pond would be out of food.
In fact, that's not what happens at all. As long as bluegill are present in that pond/lake, tilapia increase survival rates of baby bluegill. Think about it mathematically. Tilapia outproduct the bluegills. Say your pond produces 100,000 tilapia and 50,000 baby bluegills over a three month period. What's the statistical chance that those bluegill will be eaten? The odds shift and bluegill survival rises. Over the entire year, baby bluegill have the opportunity to thrive with lower odds of being eaten than if there were no tilapia in the lake. As the season progresses and we get into fall, tilapia become sluggish. Bass gorge themselves on small tilapia and the bigger ones die off. Left behind? Thousands of small bluegill which were able to survive because of the big numbers of tilapia in that pond. So, you have good odds of more forage fish going into winter than if you hadn't stocked tilapia in the first place.
Back to the original question. I like the premise. If a lake has plentiful food and bass have lots of options as what to eat, they eat more freely. I think that's the concept that's being asked.
I've been studying intently "catch rates" and people tend to think it's mostly related to hunger. Other folks think bass become hook shy when too much fishing pressure is on a fishery. Still, others believe that when we catch and remove bass, we are basically harvesting the most aggressive fish in the lake and altering the evolution of that fishery into a passive one, genetically.
It makes sense to me that a lake teeming with baitfish, even if those forage fish stocks are seasonal, could certainly impact the behavior of the nearby predator fish population. It makes sense to me that they could be aggressively feeding when that food is availabile. If so, it makes me think that catch rates should rise.
