Like their larger cousins, white bass and striped bass, they roam open water in large schools, devouring shiners, shad and minnows. They also eat insects and crustaceans like crawfish. Abundant but little noticed, yellow bass seldom reach 2 pounds. That s great striper bait, Walker commented. A lot of bass anglers believe that stripers eat black bass, but that s a myth.
Stripers eat very few black bass.
They normally don t occupy the same territory. Bobby Reed, district fisheries biologist for the Lake Charles office of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, later confirmed Walker s assertion. In fact, the LDWF originally stocked stripers into Toledo Bend in the early 1970s not as a game fish, but to control excess forage fish, primarily gizzard shad. There have been a lot of misconceptions about what stripers feed upon, Reed said. Many bass and crappie fishermen believe stripers consume large amounts of game fish.