Selectivity, educated fish and exact imitations in regards to fishing

[Norm M]

I am reading a book What Trout Want, The Educated Trout and Other Myths by Bob Wyatt .

 So far as I've got his argument is that trout don't get educated to fly patterns and thus become selective in the flies they take thus necessitating even more perfect imitations of natural foods .

 One point is that poor presentation is more of a factor than a fly imperfectly tied . Another is that trout due to the size of their brain are incapable of having acquired a conceptual grasp of what it means to be genuine or fake . He further states that when speaking of fish feeding selectively from a animal behaviorist point of view it isn't a matter of choice, suspicion or taste but about efficiency, getting the most nutrition with the least amount of energy expended .

 " Trout are fundamentally no different from any other fish . Out there in the fish world, selective feeding isn't about scrutinizing, choosing and refusing. It's about zeroing in on the most abundant and highest - quality food when it's available and eating as much as possible while the getting's good. "

" The "selectivity" that biologists observe isn't anything like a trout making fastidious choices between male and female Tricorythodes subimago, or judging an insects correctness of form , or choosing it's prey based on the mysterious color preferences of Ray Bergman's aesthetically refined trout. It's about focusing on prey by it's size and abundance and how it behaves in the water. In the case of prolific and sustained insect hatches , it's a matter of the trout not recognizing anything else as food - a kind of tunnel vision. "

 "This isn't the choosy behavior of a sophisticated and fussy eater, but the innate stimulus and response of an efficient predator fully exploiting it's niche in the ecosystem. Behavioral ecologists call this predictable response to it's prey the trout's " fixed action pattern" - genetically programmed behavior the fish can't help ."

  On another point about learning he mentions the exposed hook issue in fly fishing.  His point being that even on heavily pressured waters trout have not learned to recognize what a hook is as they continue to be caught on flies with exposed hooks . In something like a fly that is trying to imitate something natural an exposed hook is as unnatural a cue as there could be .

 On the point of exact imitations he points out that in a book by G.E.M. Skues , The Way of a Trout with a Fly there are ten photos of flies called Blue Duns from different regions of the British Isles .
 The fly in every one of those photos are meant to imitate the same insect the Dark Spring Baetis Olive yet all are different from each other, none even remotely resemble the natural dun and all work . 

 Here are a couple more quotes from as far as I've made it into the book that I find interesting.

 " The impression of life is the most important trigger to a predatory response. How we achieve that is more important than just matching relatively unimportant aspects such as color. "

" The best impressionistic patterns don't imitate anything in particular but do a good job of suggesting most of the things trout eat for a living."

Now to some of my thoughts .

 Most of us have read in one place or another about bass becoming educated to certain types of lures/ techniques and them losing their effectiveness in those bodies of water where they receive heavy use .  Does this really happen and if it does is it a function of how unnatural that lure is . Say the difference between a tandem spin and a smoke colored grub on a plain jig tarnished by dulling the finish in the flame of a cigarette lighter.  How many of us have caught the same fish[known due to distinguishing features of the fish or actually seeing it in clear water] multiple times on the same lure ?

 Most articles say that the older/bigger fish get the most educated to lure/technique . Yet many of the truly large smallmouth I have caught have been on a crankbait . That is a lure type that has seen heavy use on my river for decades . It may be because I was using much larger crankbaits than most.  I am fairly certain I caught the same three big fish[distinguishing markings]  more than once from the same places with the exact same lure . Quite possibly statically insignificant, I grant, but then are there solid numbers to prove educated fish or rod/reel observation like this ?

 On exact imitations , I never understood why a photo exact finish on a lure would be better at catching a fish than say a countershaded one . After all one is purporting to be an exact replica of a fish that years of evolution have designed an appearance to disguise it from predators while the other stands out like a sore thumb . The first, I always believed was designed to catch fisherman's money more so than to catch fish . I have one photo finish lure, a Rebel Bluegill that I bought because I liked how it looked and it was in a bargain bin[ I can be a sucker for bargain bins at times] . That lure sits in storage in the garage because I caught so few fish with it over the 5 years it was in the lake rotation .

 Could it be that when we can actually see fish turning away or ignoring our lures that it is more likely that we as fisherman are doing something wrong presentation wise than how closely the lure actually looks like real forage ?  I think that things like size, profile/shape, vibration , flash and possibly scent are more of a factor in presenting cues that lead to a bite than exact imitation as long as we get the proper presentation in depth and speed control . Blow those two factors and you won't catch them . Some might argue that when fish are in a highly competitive feeding mode with other fish you can be a bit sloppy with speed/depth control. I would argue that in that case the fish have just expanded their strike window and you did match those two factors .   

 As far as color goes , I don't think it's much of an issue with river smallmouth. They have a very limited amount of time to instinctively decide can I catch and eat that without expending too much energy. I believe that is the major factor in pushing the eat/no eat button.  I also believe that the factors I listed above are more of a factor than color in the cues for the eat/no eat button to be pushed. I seriously doubt they have the mental capability to decide that lure is red and I'm not eating that color today . 

 All thoughts pro or con gladly accepted and taken into consideration .

[fishinwrench]

It is really easy to get a fish to move towards a bait/fly/lure but the closer the fish gets to opening its mouth and eating it the odds of the fish deciding to turn away increases.  Several things, aside from looks and even action, can close the deal in your favor.  Other fish being nearby helps because the competition factor makes them more careless/greedy, this is why bluegill, crappie, and white bass are so easy to catch (once found)..... because they are never alone.    Startling a fish by suddenly putting something seemingly foodlike in its face more often than not will cause a loner fish to bite out of instinct, but a fish all by himself will very rarely chase down a lure and end up biting it unless he is nearing starvation OR the bait looks and acts so real (right down to the last millisecond) that it truly fools him. Realistic paint jobs on crankbaits and ultra lifelike looking flys really don't seal the deal IMO, we may have mastered the "look" but there is obviously more to it than that.   

Hopefully we never fully figure it all out, cuz if we ever do it will all get very boring very fast.  ?

[Norm M]

9 hours ago, fishinwrench said:

It is really easy to get a fish to move towards a bait/fly/lure but the closer the fish gets to opening its mouth and eating it the odds of the fish deciding to turn away increases.  Several things, aside from looks and even action, can close the deal in your favor.  Other fish being nearby helps because the competition factor makes them more careless/greedy, this is why bluegill, crappie, and white bass are so easy to catch (once found)..... because they are never alone.    Startling a fish by suddenly putting something seemingly foodlike in its face more often than not will cause a loner fish to bite out of instinct, but a fish all by himself will very rarely chase down a lure and end up biting it unless he is nearing starvation OR the bait looks and acts so real (right down to the last millisecond) that it truly fools him. Realistic paint jobs on crankbaits and ultra lifelike looking flys really don't seal the deal IMO, we may have mastered the "look" but there is obviously more to it than that.   

Hopefully we never fully figure it all out, cuz if we ever do it will all get very boring very fast.  ?

  yes , it would be akin to getting a date with every girl you asked out in high school . well, at least for me .

 

 someone once said in a post I read that heck was catching a trophy fish on every cast, for eternity .

[Al Agnew]

I've never been able to figure out the whole selective trout thing.  On the one hand, I've had plenty of experiences of trout happily eating bugs floating past them, while ignoring my fly, which is drifting drag-free, the right size, floating well, more or less the right color.  On the other hand, I've had plenty of experiences with trout happily eating my fly, even though it wasn't QUITE the right color, right size...AND it had a big hook sticking out of its butt.  One thing I know for sure...if trout can see well enough to distiguish one fly from another, they can see the tippet (no matter how thin it is) and they can see that hook sticking out of it, hackles instead of legs, etc.  If the trout are selective enough to often reject your fly because it isn't quite the right pattern, then they shouldn't EVER eat it, because almost no flies are exact copies of the real thing.  There must be stuff regarding your presentation, or the way the fly sits on the water, or some factor we have no idea about, that makes them take it or reject it.

As for bass, the reality is that almost no lures, especially hard baits, really imitate the things they are supposed to be imitating, photo finishes or not.  No crankbait moves like a minnow or a crayfish.  No topwater moves like anything alive that I know of.  Most soft plastics are impressionistic imitations of real things at best--nothing in nature looks like a tube bait, or almost all the modernistic crawdad imitations, or flukes, etc.  Yet they all work at one time or another.  It doesn't matter to the bass--it's small enough to eat, it's moving in an interesting manner, and so they eat it.

In another discussion I was in recently, I pointed out that all lures have negative and positive cues--things about them that either turn the bass on or turn them off.  The wobble of a Wiggle Wart isn't natural, but there must be something about it that trips some attack trigger in the bass's brain now and then.  The whir of spinner blades is like nothing in nature, but they work.  Lure movement, or the movement we impart to lures, can be a positive cue--and maybe also at times a negative one.  And we can't put ourselves into the little pea brain of a bass, so we really don't know what is and isn't a positive cue until we have or don't have success with a particular lure fished a particular way.

Lure color could also be either a positive or negative cue.  Maybe a realistic color pattern sometimes is the final positive cue that makes the bass that's already interested go all the way.  Same with lure profile.  But I suspect that most of the time these are neutral, not cues either way--something else about the lure ends up being a strong enough positive cue to sell the deal.  

And since we don't usually know how many bass we put the lure in front of which never bite it (but it's a LOT), we don't often figure out what the negative cues are that turned those bass off.  Bass can learn to avoid negative stimuli.  Maybe in some bass, something inherent to our tackle or technique registered on their tiny little learning center the last three times they were hooked, and now it's a negative cue that they have finally learned to avoid.  And maybe some bass are genetically programmed not to ever eat stuff moving like a crankbait, for instance...maybe some bass are simply genetically less susceptible to the typical lures.  We all know that lightly fished waters hold easier to catch bass.  Maybe it isn't all because the existing bass in these waters have seldom been caught and released and thus haven't learned to "pay attention" to the negative cues.  Maybe it's partly because in the heavily pressured waters, the bass that are genetically most susceptible to our lures were caught and either killed or died of delayed mortality after being released, and it's the genetically less susceptible bass that best survived to pass along their genes.  

Just one more thing...of all the soft plastics, Mitch's craw bait is by far the most realistic.  Not only is it the EXACT shape down to legs and eyes of a crayfish, but the colors are about right, you can use markers to make the colors almost exact, and most importantly, you can make it move almost exactly like a softshell crawdad.  As I've said before, I was skeptical about the idea when Mitch proposed it to me, because I've seen plenty of "good" imitations of crawdads in the past that didn't really move like one in the water, and were nothing special as far as catching fish was concerned.  But because of not just the appearance but the movement, Mitch's creation is different.  It may be the exception that proves the rule of realistic imitations being no better than generic lure patterns.  It is so realistic just lying on the bottom, or crawling along the bottom, or even swimming close to but not on the bottom for a few feet, that the negative cues are very few, and the positive ones very positive.

[Norm M]

 

1 hour ago, Al Agnew said:

And since we don't usually know how many bass we put the lure in front of which never bite it (but it's a LOT), we don't often figure out what the negative cues are that turned those bass off.  Bass can learn to avoid negative stimuli.  Maybe in some bass, something inherent to our tackle or technique registered on their tiny little learning center the last three times they were hooked, and now it's a negative cue that they have finally learned to avoid.  And maybe some bass are genetically programmed not to ever eat stuff moving like a crankbait, for instance...maybe some bass are simply genetically less susceptible to the typical lures.  We all know that lightly fished waters hold easier to catch bass.  Maybe it isn't all because the existing bass in these waters have seldom been caught and released and thus haven't learned to "pay attention" to the negative cues.  Maybe it's partly because in the heavily pressured waters, the bass that are genetically most susceptible to our lures were caught and either killed or died of delayed mortality after being released, and it's the genetically less susceptible bass that best survived to pass along their genes.  

Just one more thing...of all the soft plastics, Mitch's craw bait is by far the most realistic.  Not only is it the EXACT shape down to legs and eyes of a crayfish, but the colors are about right, you can use markers to make the colors almost exact, and most importantly, you can make it move almost exactly like a softshell crawdad.  As I've said before, I was skeptical about the idea when Mitch proposed it to me, because I've seen plenty of "good" imitations of crawdads in the past that didn't really move like one in the water, and were nothing special as far as catching fish was concerned.  But because of not just the appearance but the movement, Mitch's creation is different.  It may be the exception that proves the rule of realistic imitations being no better than generic lure patterns.  It is so realistic just lying on the bottom, or crawling along the bottom, or even swimming close to but not on the bottom for a few feet, that the negative cues are very few, and the positive ones very positive.

 AL,

 The point about bass and genetic programed is one I have been thinking about .  You have stated it better than I've been able to formulate the words in my head. If you don't mind, I'd like to use that paragraph in a couple different forums, giving you full credit .

 I was also thinking about Mitch's craw and came to the same conclusion you did. Mitch, thru his hard work got it right and designed a lure with enough positives to work .

 

[Al Agnew]

Sure, Norm.

I've often thought that there are bass that are ALMOST uncatchable.  Either because of the places where they live, or because genetically they aren't usually susceptible to our lures.  Or both.  How many big smallmouth spend much of the time in big tangles of logs on our streams, right next to fast water with all the food they'd ever need, seldom even needing to come out of those places, because the food comes to them...places where our lures simply can't penetrate and reach them?  And as for those genetically programmed ones...I think there are rare times when they become susceptible.  We have all experienced short periods of phenomenal fishing a few times in our lives, when it seemed like all the big bass were on the prowl and ready to eat our lures.  And as was said before, competition makes even the biggest bass sometimes make mistakes.  One of the two biggest stream smallmouth I've ever caught tried to take the lure away from an 18 incher and got hooked itself, and one of the very biggest I've ever seen was following a hooked 18 inch largemouth.  But most of the time, these fish are never caught or even seen.  And also, much of the time on the water, we are interesting just a few of the bass that are aware of our lures, and sometimes, we fish right in the middle of a lot of bass and none of them are interested.  We like to think that if we just do everything right we can catch any bass...after all, we're smarter than they are.  But they aren't outsmarting us, they simply aren't susceptible to our lures.

[Norm M]

 Thanks Al.

 Back when I lived further north in Cook County there was a forest preserve lake that I had a lot of success on . I thought I had it cracked . We had a severe winter think it was 1978 that winter killed a very significant portion of the fish population . I assisted the county fisheries biologist in making the count . I was stunned by the amount of big largemouth that were dead, as compared to the number of them that I had caught. In discussing it with the biologist he said much the same thing . Those fish were likely set up so well that they just ignored lures and likely may never have paid them any mind . He was the first person to ever suggest to me that there were fish that were wired not to be attracted to lures.

 One of my best friends and my favorite fishing partner lives about an hour south of me in Illinois. He has those small flows wired in down there. He bought an Aqua View camera and would paddle over after fishing a spot to see just what was in that spot that attracted the fish. He finally quit doing it because he said it was very humbling to actually see how many fish were there, that he never caught .  He fishes spots thoroughly with a variety of lures, retrieves, speeds and from the surface to the bottom .

 I have no doubt that we fish our lures past a lot more fish than we ever catch .

 I had the same experience with the biggest smallmouth I ever saw . It was following a big smallmouth that I had hooked.  I fished that area almost daily for a month with every lure and live bait I could buy or trap/seine from the same river. I even conditioned crawlers the nite crawler secrets way .  I never caught that fish despite going to 2lb test and free lining live bait . I have no doubt that I did something , maybe just the drag of the current on the line that made even live bait move unnaturally enough to turn that fish off .

 

[Gavin]

Used to overthink stuff a lot. Keep your candy in the water as much as possible and you will catch some fish. Timing seems to be more important. If the fish want to move 25' to eat its on. The feeding lamp is  lit! Sometimes the strike zone is the size of a dime.

[snagged in outlet 3]

I wish I would have saved it and I've tried to find it again but can't.  It was a study of rainbow trout.  They stocked a pond with trout and fished for them.  The one's they caught were put in a nearby pond leaving the one's they couldn't catch in the first.  No matter how you tried catch the remaining fish in the first pond, including live bait, they simply wouldn't bite.  

They repeated the stocking several times with the same results.  But you could fish the second pond with fish that already been caught and catch them again and again.   

Also, there is a book by Leonard Wright called Fly Fishing Heresies where he states that as a kid an old guy would give him flies to use.  But he wanted them back if they caught fish, no matter how tore up they got.  He would use those tore up flies to modify his "perfect" patterns to imitate the tore up ones.  

I've been keeping old flies for years, especially dry flies.  You ever notice how the bite would shut off when you lost the fly they were biting on even though you put on a new one?  

[Norm M]

I am pretty sure I remember some of the Illinois Natural History guys doing a similar study with bluegills on some of their lakes . I do some digging see if I can find it .