When you smell or taste food you generally eat what you like and
reject what you don't like. In many ways fish are just the same with our
fishing baits. In fact the palatability of your bait is often the
deciding factor in whether you get a bite or not at all!
But what
makes a fish bite at a bait and get near enough you hook to get caught
anyway? There are very many reasons a fish will investigate and sample a
bait or common object. Fish are very highly attuned to their aquatic
environment having lots of specialised cells inside and outside the body
to detect things like electric fields, sounds and pressure waves,
light, movement, smells and tastes of things in the water giving-off
myriad signals for the fish to detect.
It is any wonder that we
get bites at all with all the aquatic clutter of distracting signals
that fish experience all the time. But fish do respond to many things in
very tiny levels. Many fish can detect the movements of tiny food items
like water fleas swimming around them, and detect their size and
density in order to decide whether they are worth the energy expenditure
of feeding on. Many omnivorous fish are also opportunistic predators
and many is the time carp have been caught on spinners and plugs.
Worms
are a very successful bait for many species like catfish and tench, not
least because of the movements they make in the water, and any angler
who has ever used live bait will agree it works better when it is still
actually moving and active! (Dead maggots on the hook do not match-up to
fresh live ones for example.) In the case of worms and maggots it is
obvious that many species will reliably instantly chomp on them with no
need whatsoever of introducing any free baits into your swim beforehand
and this might pose a good question.
Apart from movement there are
other things going on. Many fish species have good eyesight up close to
things even if they do have an area directly in front of them that
might be blind. As long as there is sufficient light then various
colours and shades of bait can improve your catch rate and at night
luminous glowing baits can make a difference.
Many fish depend on
movement instead of sight at night but other signals are used such as
reception of minute electrical fields issuing from live creatures for
example. Carp depend predominantly upon chemical stimuli along with
detection of tiny electrical fields and pressure waves for instance,
which all enable these fish to orientate themselves in the water and to
locate food. Fish can orient their preferred location by sensing the
level of dissolved carbon dioxide (carbonic acid) present in the water,
and they are very sensitive to water pH changes. (Fishing bait
substances that can elicit pH changes when realised into the water
column certainly impact upon fish nearby.)
In the case of bass for
instance, they utilise whatever ambient light there is the atmosphere
by sitting in dark shady position in the water and waiting for prey fish
to silhouette themselves so giving themselves away to the predatory
bass. Some fish have more highly developed radar which is similar to the
side-scan radar of a submarine. Although dolphins are mammals, you
might wonder how they detect sand eels hidden underneath the sand!
Hormones
are secreted by fish to identify themselves, to find a mate, to enable
tight shoaling behaviour essential for survival, as in young big mouth
bass for instance.
But 2 of the most significant aspects of how fish experience their
world which we can use to exploit in order to catch, are the olfaction
and chemoreception systems. They sound complicated, but basically
olfaction is the smell sense and chemoreception is the taste sense and
although there is far more to this simplistic description, when combined
together, the taste and smell of your bait can truly determine if you
will catch or not.
Fish have special receptor cells both
externally and internally which electrochemically interact with
water-born chemical stimuli. It may not come as a surprise that you can
sniff and taste a beef burger and love it one minute, then when you've
had 10, a biofeedback mechanism from your stomach to your brain tells
you no more please.
Fish have many biofeedback mechanisms and
rhythms related to feeding habits and efficient food digestion. Like
humans, they regulate how fish get turned on by food, in this case our
bits.
What if you could get inside their heads and influence their
behaviour from there, that would be cool right!? Well we can easily
make baits impact upon fish senses and on their brain chemical and
hormones to incite a favourable feeding behaviour response to our baits
and hugely improve our chances of catching fish. Just consider this;
when you drink plain water why do you prefer a sweet fruit juice or can
of Cola. That is the principle I'm talking about.
In carp fishing,
there is an over-used phrase that supposedly describes what baits fish
prefer: "Sometimes they want ice-cream instead of roast beef." But why
is this an interesting phrase? Well fish can be stimulated into feeding
by at least 6 obvious types of stimuli, from sound and movement to
hormones and electrical fields, to sight, and others too, but more
specifically these.
Fish feeding is stimulated by substances which
approximate or mimic substances found naturally in their environment
and also those that are not. So teamed with the substances they
naturally respond as in their natural diet for instance, there is a
gigantic range of substances you can use in your baits.
The trick
in many respects in making fishing bait more exciting to fish is to
match the stimulating substances found within their specific natural
foods and use these perhaps in more refined and much more concentrated
form. For example, when fish are processed one stage produces the water
soluble fraction which is often high in quality easily digestible fish
protein and fish oils. These 2 substances when used together in a dough
or paste, pellet or boilie fishing bait work wonders as they are such
naturally potent fish feeding triggers. Other aspects of fishmeal can be
analysed to see what turns your fish on. Betaine is used very
frequently in carp and catfish fishing baits for the same reason.
But
do not forget that flavours substances impact upon and enhance the mass
of flavours already inherent in a bait. These flavours and their
individual components can be detected by the fish in various
concentrations and depending on the fish species. One of the most
important substances both flavours and betaine interact with and enhance
are the amino acids.
If you add gravy or black pepper or salt to a
steak it helps you enjoy it just as much as real ice-cream with that
rich Tutti Frutti favour that makes you want more and more. The funny
thing is that there is far more vitally essential nutrition in the steak
and if you were lost in a jungle you would choose to eat a steak rather
than eat an ice-cream as soon as you got out. Why you prefer the steak
over the ice-cream is because a steak has nutrition you essentially need
to stay alive and without the amino acids and trace minerals needed you
body would start to rapidly deteriorate.
The fact that over the
decades countless big fish from carp and catfish, to bass, trout, pike
and even sharks, have fallen to protein based baits rich in fish
essential nutrients means that this is a proven basis for big-fish
baits. Add to this the benefits of flavours from natural to synthetic,
nature-identical to mixtures of many forms, fishing baits can be made to
be constantly unique to keep ahead of the fish and keep you catching!
This
fishing bait secrets ebooks author has many more fishing and bait
edges; just one could impact very significantly on your catches!
By Tim Richardson.
For the unique new expert bait making and bait secrets bibles :
"BIG CATFISH AND CARP BAIT SECRETS!"
And:
"BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!" And "BIG CARP FLAVOURS AND FEEDING TRIGGER SECRETS!"
Visit:
http://www.baitbigfish.com
Tim
Richardson is a homemade carp and catfish bait maker and proven big
fish angler. His unique bait making and enhancing fishing secrets guides
are seriously multiplying their readers big fish catches in over 45
countries so visit this unique secrets site right NOW!
