COLUMN : BASS HISTORY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ken Duke has been writing about all aspects of bass fishing for 40 years . When he ’ s not reading about , writing about , thinking about or talking about bass fishing , he ’ s usually bass fishing . the fox in the hen house
An unhealthy mix between largemouth bass and the “ poc ” led to extinction of a species
f you ’ ve never heard of the giant pied-billed grebe ( i . e ., Podilymbus gigas to all you Latin
I speakers out there ), don ’ t beat yourself up . Very few people have heard of the bird . Fewer have seen one , and their numbers will not rise because the giant pied-billed grebe – or “ poc ” – is extinct . The last of them shuffled off this mortal coil more than 30 years ago , and the largemouth bass played a role in their demise .
By way of background , you may be interested to know that the poc is a water bird that was native to Lago de Atitlán in Guatemala . The lake covers about 32,000 acres and sits a mile high in the Sierra Madres . Atitlán was formed by a volcanic eruption some 80,000 years ago . It ’ s the deepest lake in Central America , plummeting to nearly 1,200 feet in places .
Amazingly , only Atitlán offered the unique set of ecological , geological , and other conditions that allowed pocs to survive .
And although the poc had certainly been at Atitlán for many millennia , no one really took notice of it until a naturalist identified it in the 1920s . And despite the designation “ giant ,” it was only large in comparison to other grebes . An adult poc measured less than 20 inches long as it paddled across the surface . It had white plumage in spring but was dark brown the rest of the year . The underside or belly of the bird was dark gray .
Few birds are truly flightless , but the poc was one . Their small wings were incapable of flight but did a good job of propelling them through the water as they dived for food . Grebes ate small fish , crabs , snails , aquatic insects , tadpoles and frogs . They could stay submerged for more than a minute and cover the length of a football field in that time .
26 MAJORLEAGUEFISHING . COM | DECEMBER-JANUARY 2023