Black Bass: What the Name Means, and All 19 Species

Black bass are the North American freshwater genus Micropterus: the largemouth, the smallmouth, the spotted bass and 16 close relatives, 19 species in all. If you came for the saltwater fish on restaurant menus, that is the black sea bass, Centropristis striata, a different fish from a different family; NOAA Fisheries has its biology and rules. Everything below is about the freshwater black basses anglers chase.

Florida’s fishing law protects the Choctaw bass by name, yet in zoology the fish still has no valid scientific name: its proposed name, Micropterus haiaka, was never published under the rules.

What is a black bass?

A black bass is any fish of the genus Micropterus, part of the sunfish family, Centrarchidae. That makes them cousins of the bluegill and the crappie, not of the striped bass. The temperate basses, stripers, white bass and yellow bass, belong to another family, Moronidae.

The name is old and plain. Early federal fisheries reports wrote “small-mouthed black bass”, and the federal law of 1926 that protected these fish across state lines spoke of “black bass” too. Biologists still use the term for the whole genus; the fishing terms glossary gives the short version.

Jacob Reighard’s photograph for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (Bulletin for 1908, printed 1910) is captioned as the nest of a “small-mouthed black bass” (Micropterus dolomieu). Photo: Jacob Ellsworth Reighard, Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

How many species of black bass are there?

There are 19. A 2022 genetic study by Daemin Kim, Andrew Taylor and Thomas Near sorted the genus into 19 species, of which only 14 had a scientific name. Two more were named in August 2025, so in October 2026 the count is 16 named species and 3 still waiting for a formal description: the Little River bass, the Ouachita bass and the Choctaw bass.

The Choctaw bass is the odd one. Florida biologists found its DNA in a Chipola River fish in 2007, announced the species in 2013 and proposed the name Micropterus haiaka. The Catalog of Fishes, the reference list taxonomists use, files that name as not published under the zoological code. Until someone publishes a full description, the right way to write it is “proposed name M. haiaka”.

One more name circulates: the Presque Isle bass, M. parallelus, described from Lake Erie in 2024. The Catalog of Fishes calls the publication unavailable and the fish possibly a hybrid, so it is not in the count.

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All 19 black basses: where they live and the record

Most anglers will only ever meet the first three or four fish on this list. The rest live in one river system each, mostly in Alabama and Georgia, and several of them are fished for on purpose by anglers chasing a slam. A linked name leads to our guide.

A dash in the record column means the IGFA’s record search returns no approved all-tackle record for that fish. The IGFA added categories for the Neosho bass and four of the redeyes in June 2024, but its online search returns no record for them. The all-tackle record is the heaviest fish of a species on any line class.

Two records look strange until you know the history. The spotted bass record is only 2 lb 8 oz because the giant “spotted bass” on the old books turned out to be Alabama bass, and the category was reset. The shoal bass record of 4 lb 13 oz was caught on the Flint River in March 2026. The IGFA’s shoal bass notes still print 8 lb 12 oz, the weight of a 1995 Apalachicola River fish filed as a redeye bass and since retired.

How did the count reach 19?

The genus grew slowly for two centuries, then fast once DNA came in:

1. 1802. Lacépède names the genus with the smallmouth, M. dolomieu. In the same book he describes a bass from the Carolinas as Labrus salmoides, the name the largemouth then carried for 220 years.
2. 1819 to 1874. The spotted bass is named from the Ohio River (1819), Huro nigricans from Lake Huron (1828) and the Guadalupe bass from Texas (1874). The Lake Huron name was later filed as a duplicate of salmoides and shelved.
3. 1940 and 1949. Hubbs and Bailey describe the redeye and, as subspecies, the Neosho and Alabama bass; the Suwannee bass follows in 1949.
4. 1999. The shoal bass, long mistaken for a redeye, gets its own name.
5. 2013. Four Alabama and Georgia river forms of the redeye are named as species: Cahaba, Chattahoochee, Tallapoosa and Warrior. Florida announces the Choctaw bass the same year.
6. 2022. Kim, Taylor and Near count 19 species. Because the Carolina fish of 1802 was a Florida bass, M. salmoides goes to the Florida bass, and the largemouth takes the Lake Huron name, M. nigricans. The American Fisheries Society’s official names list follows in 2023.
7. 2024. The IGFA splits the record book: Florida bass and Alabama bass get their own categories, and any new all-tackle largemouth record needs a genetic test.
8. 2025. Bartram’s bass and Altamaha bass, both split from the redeye, are described in Zootaxa on August 19.

Is a largemouth or a smallmouth a black bass?

Yes. “Black bass” is the group and the largemouth is one member of it, the way a mallard is a duck. The same goes for the smallmouth, the spotted bass and every fish in the table above. A fish called a black bass in a freshwater lake is almost always one of the first three.

Telling the common ones apart takes a few seconds. Close the mouth: on a largemouth the upper jaw reaches past the back of the eye, on a smallmouth and a spotted bass it stops below it. The smallmouth vs largemouth page settles that mix-up with the fish in your hand. The spotted bass has a rough tooth patch on its tongue. Where each of the three sits through the year is on the bass fishing page.

What does “black bass” mean in the fishing regulations?

In law, “black bass” means the species a state lists, and the lists differ. That matters most when a state counts every black bass toward one daily bag, which is what the term usually does in a rulebook.

Florida names the Choctaw bass in its rules and protects it with a 12 in (30 cm) minimum, the same as Suwannee, shoal and spotted bass. Florida and largemouth bass have no minimum there. Before you keep a fish, check your own state’s list and the bag limit for the water you fish.

The federal black bass act became law on May 20, 1926, and made it illegal to carry largemouth or smallmouth black bass taken against state law across state lines. Congress repealed it on November 16, 1981, in the Lacey Act Amendments of that year.

Is a black bass rare?

The common ones are not. The largemouth has been stocked far beyond its native range, on other continents too, and the how to catch bass guide starts with the fish in your nearest pond. The smallmouth and the spotted bass have been moved well outside their home waters as well.

The rare ones are the river specialists. Bartram’s bass lives only in the Savannah River drainage and sits on the wildlife action plans of both South Carolina and Georgia. The biggest threat to it and its cousins is not fishing. Introduced bass breed with the natives, and the 2025 description had to pick its type specimens by DNA to find fish that were not hybrids. North Carolina lists the Alabama bass as invasive for that reason.

That rarity is what anglers chase. Georgia DNR’s Bass Slam asks you to catch five of the state’s ten native black basses in one calendar year, and only 68 anglers finished it in 2025. If you catch one of the rare ones, a quick photo and a fast release are what the fishery needs.

Which fish are called black bass but are not?

Two fish share the name without belonging to the genus. The black sea bass is a saltwater fish of the Atlantic coast, family Serranidae, sold and eaten as a sea bass. The Papuan black bass of New Guinea rivers is a snapper, Lutjanus goldiei; its IGFA record is 47 lb 8 oz (21.5 kg), caught on the Tauri River in 2015.

Plenty of other fish are called bass without being black bass: the striped, white and yellow bass, the rock bass of the sunfish family, the peacock bass, which is a cichlid. The panfish section covers the rock bass’s sunfish relatives, and the striped bass section the temperate basses.

Is black bass good to eat?

Yes, black bass are eaten wherever they are caught, but whether you should eat a given fish depends on the water it came from. For fish you catch, the FDA and EPA say to check the local advisory; where there is none, eat one serving and no other fish that week. The largemouth page has the state examples. The saltwater black sea bass is on the agencies’ “Best Choice” list.

Many bass anglers release their fish anyway. The bass you let go today is next spring’s spawning fish, and the best bass lures will find it again.

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