On April 4, young bass tournament angler Devon Dvorak was fishing a public central-Iowa bass lake. The wind was howling with temperatures in the 30s. And while the water temperature was just 42 degrees, the bass were eating — and Dvorak was catching them.
“Right after ice-out is a great time to catch bass in Iowa because the weeds are down, and baitfish and panfish are vulnerable,” Dvorak, 23, told Wired2fish. “I was fishing alone, and really got into some good bass. There were plenty of 2- to 5-pounders that are easy to spot with forward-facing sonar.”
An Attention-Grabbing Disturbance
It was mid-morning and Dvorak was easing along in his bass boat over 15 feet of clear water. That’s when he noticed something surface-splash about 40 yards away.
“I thought it was a bass because a lot of times they rush smaller fish and slam them on top, so I made a cast to the splash,” said Dvorak, who works for Corteva Agriscience from his home in Keystone, Iowa. “Nothing hit, so I went back to my fishing. Then I saw the splash again.”
Dvorak turned his boat and headed toward the surface disturbance.
As he got closer he spotted something rarely seen by bass anglers anywhere.
Recording a Rarity
Dvorak turned on his video camera to record the action while grabbing for a large landing net.
One heavy bass had another, smaller bass lodged tightly in its wide-open mouth. They both were flopping around the water’s surface.
“They were locked together when I netted them,” he said. “It was incredible.”
Dvorak dipped the bass, put them in his boat, then carefully pried the two apart. He weighed the bigger fish at about five pounds, with the smaller bass about two pounds.
He recorded the entire event and posted the video throughout social media, where it’s drawn millions of views on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
Lots of Theories, No Answers
All types of bass are notoriously aggressive. They’ve been documented eating everything from poisonous snakes to birds, turtles, frogs, lizards, and fin-fish species too numerous to name.
They’re cannibalistic, too — but for a five-pounder to try and eat another bass nearly half its size? The age-old concept that big lures catch big fish is surely proven by what Dvorak videoed that chilly day in Iowa.
Some folks who have seen the video wonder if the two bass were attacking a baitfish when they collided, with the smaller fish jamming inside the maw of the bigger bass.
Others think the bigger fish was just trying to eat the smaller bass.
“I don’t know which theory is the right one,” muses Dvorak. “But it’s not something a fisherman sees every day.”
