These impacts have been documented by population research. Some anglers, looking for someone else to blame for poor black bass angling, have often distorted the biological relationships involved, particularly in the TVA lake arguments. Many waters that once briefly produced decent black bass fishing cease doing so naturally as waters age. Good black bass habitat requires cover and flats, and many highland lakes with steep sides are not particularly good black bass habitat, even though they briefly produced superior bassing in the first 6-10 years of impoundment. Moreover, anglers themselves have destroyed many early reservoir black bass populations by over harvesting fish.
Stripers eat preyfish, particularly shad.
When shad are in short supply, this puts them in direct competition for food with black bass and other gamefish like crappie that also eat predominantly shad when shad are abundant. But the impact on black bass is usually not direct. Black bass also eat sunfish and minnows, which are normally not found abundantly in the open water habitats occupied by striped bass. As a result, large stripers only compete directly with black bass in seasons when bass are in cool water and eating less. Thus, surveys have tended to show little decrease in size of the bass populations, and little decrease in growth rates of bass after stripers are stocked, particularly in waters already shared with white bass.