Bill Kay

No walleye today. I only saw 5 others fishing. Saw 2 other buffalo caught, and one guy said he caught some crappie in the old channel. If they would run some water I think the walleye would move in.

Fished about 3 hrs. this morning, had about 5 bites total, all on a phantom pink Slab Slay'r.

Fish DO feel pain. They have pain receptors and a central nervous system. The point is that they do not conceptualize pain and develop an emotional response to it the way higher vertebrates like mammals do. In my opinion your piranhas were simply responding to negative stimuli, and avoiding it. They probably were not in fear to the same extent that your Convicts were not in love with each other--simply doing what biology told them to do for survival (I say probably because the widely held understanding of how the vertebrate brain works certainly could be wrong.) I read about another study some time ago where the researchers scanned fish for brain activity, then inflicted a painful stimulus. The only place that showed any change in activity was the brain stem, indicating the only response was fight of flight. They weren't tortured--at least not in a way that I would define torture. I looked for information on this study, but came up empty. So we stick a hook in a fishes mouth, remove it from the water, remove the hook and release it quickly. It is stressed, and its mouth is probably sore, but it isn't afraid, and freaking out, and saying "Why me? What did I do to deserve this?" I should also mention, however, that when the same scientific community that makes these claims about fish tells me that my little English Setter does not feel guilt and does not love me--I call BS. I cannot watch her behavior and see anything but guilt when she does something wrong and love when she looks up at me when I scratch her ears. So maybe I am entirely wrong.

Mr. Agnew is dead on regarding how fish experience and react to pain stimuli. Here is a link to a thorough review of the literature on the subject. The Neurobehavioral Nature of Fishes and the Question of Awareness and Pain The study is somewhat long, but the gist is contained in the abstract that I have copied from below: "The literature on the neural basis of consciousness and of pain is reviewed, showing that: (1) behavioral responses to noxious stimuli are separate from the psychological experience of pain, (2) awareness of pain in humans depends on functions of specific regions of cerebral cortex, and (3) fishes lack these essential brain regions or any functional equivalent, making it untenable that they can experience pain. Because the experience of fear, similar to pain, depends on cerebral cortical structures that are absent from fish brains, it is concluded that awareness of fear is impossible for fishes." As a matter of fact, many fish behave pretty much the same if you remove their cerebral cortex (the thinking part of the brain.)

There is a formula for the weight of a bass if you know its length and girth. Measure the length and girth in inches. Then multiply length X length X girth, then divide by 1200. It is not exact, but in my experience seems to be pretty close. It seems that in the small lakes that I fish in west central Mo., six pounds seems to be the max. potential for most fish. I catch good numbers up to about 6, but few over that. I did work with a guy that had permission to fish a small farm pond near Creighton and caught one that was 13 even, weighed on certified scales by the Conservation Agent. Bass Pro agreed to take it but he had it on a stringer in the pond and a snapping turtle killed it. I saw it dead or I wouldn't have believed it. So it can happen. I caught the one below last March. It was 24" long with a 16" girth. Didn't weigh it but I don't think it would have made 8.