Florida bass
species of fish
The Florida bass (Micropterus salmoides floridanus) is a species of freshwater ray-finned fish, a black bass belonging to the sunfish family Centrarchidae of order Centrarchiformes. It is found in the southeastern United States.
Taxonomy
The Florida bass was first formally described in 1822 as Cichla floridana by the French naturalist Charles Alexandre Lesueur with the type locality given as Eastern Florida. It was considered to be conspecific with the largemouth bass (M. nigricans), albeit as a subspecies; however, more recently it has been treated as a valid species. A 2022 phylogenomic study supported its status as a valid species but found that it was more widespread than previously thought. In fact the type locality of M. salmoides was found to be within the range of M. floridanus and this means that the species described as M. salmoides by Bernard Germain de Lacépède in 1802 was the Florida bass and not the largemouth bass. If this is the case then the correct binomial for the Florida bass is M. salmoides with M. floridanus as a junior synonym. The largemouth bass is renamed M. nigricans (Cuvier, 1822), which has a type locality of Lake Huron which is within the range of the largemouth bass.
Description
The Florida bass resembles the largemouth bass in that it has an elongate body that varies in color from a silvery-white to brassy-green and sometimes to a pale brown in murkier waters. The coloration forms a camouflaged pattern as there is a mottling of dark olive mottling along the upper body and a wide black stripe that is normally split into a line of blotches and greenish-black spots along the flank.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Florida bass” as species of fish. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the science & nature register because the source frames it as species of fish. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5614655. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1822, 2022 and 1802.
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This entry incorporates text from “Florida bass” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.