Some thoughts about baits

[Bill Hedden]

How many times have you fellow muskie nuts said, "The fish came in hot with her nose right on the bait and then she didn't eat. I can't believe it!"

That idea of the fish having their noses right on the bait got me thinking and then doing some research to see what role smell plays in their feeding behavior. It turns out that muskies and pike are certainly not the olfactory champions of the fish world (that would be sharks), but they have a pretty good sense of smell. Further, studies have shown that the various sensory systems of muskies play different roles in the different parts of a feeding sequence. Typically, a muskie begins with visual location of their prey. Their eyes are each connected only to the opposite sides of their brains. Though they see fine out to the sides and even a little to the rear, their predation reflex is best provoked when both sides of their brains are being stimulated, or when the prey is in their area of binocular vision, out in front of them. At that point, they almost always begin stalking their prey (in the studies, immediate strikes without stalking occur only about 20% of the time), using mostly their pectoral and caudal fins, so that is why they hardly seem to be moving when they follow a bait. It isn't until they decide to eat that they use their tail fin, which bends the body into the S-curve that spells bad news for a perch or cisco or walleye. So the follows we get are not something weird, but part of the deal, except they probably go on longer because the fish aren't really getting the right cues from our artificial baits. As Herbie says, "If the fish wanted that bait, it would have hit it way out and you couldn't have gotten it away from her."

Now here is where it starts to get interesting. As the fish closes in on the prey or lure, the lateral line, which detects minute changes in pressure in the water, begins to become more and more important. In the real strike itself, the lateral line may be more important than sight. The fish are using their chemical senses as much as sight in the infighting. Blinded fish are as successful at feeding as healthy fish, though they strike from closer in. Fish whose lateral lines have been wiped out by surgery or chemicals also feed successfully visually, but blind and lateral-line deprived fish can't feed at all (and those kinds of experiments are why I'm no longer a scientist).

So what does this have to do with fishing or lures? Well, a muskie is constantly constructing a picture of its world from its senses, just like we are. They see the flash of a lure and orient to it as possibly something to eat. They follow and sense the vibrations and they know: pike=lunch! But what if it is a double 10 blade bait? In their world there is no such thing as something whizzing through the water flashing and vibrating that is not food, so they follow the dumb thing, often with their nose right behind it. Almost certainly, they are trying to get all the clues they can about what it is, and smell is doubtless one of the most important of those clues. If there is no smell, or only the foreign smell of reel oil or human hand, then likely we are going to have to go crazy with the figure eight to provoke them to eat something that doesn't really add up to food.

So, what if we started to put scent on muskie lures like walleye and bass anglers do? Have people been doing this regularly and I'm the only one who doesn't know? Has anybody got experience with doing it? How did it turn out?

Bill Hedden

[Alexnsw]

I thought about that very idea a few years back, and gave it very limited time. Nor was my method of application particularly brilliant. What I did was soak pork rinds in Dr. Juice or something like that. punch a hole in the rind and attach it to a crosslock snap off the last split ring in a bucktail. Perhaps it was the conflicting visual of a bucktail and smell of a baitfish, or my lax method, but i got no discernable results. I am fairly sure some have, but personally I have not.

I will probably end up trying again,
Alex

[DanR]

Interesting post Bill. The more and more I fish, the more I think that if these things want to eat, they will eat. Nothing can stop them. Obviously, you hope your bait is in front of them when they are in this mood (or a feeding window).

Then there are the times where "maybe" they will eat. This is where it gets interesting. There's two ways to approach this in my estimation. One, you spend time trying to get the fish to bite. Maybe using scents like you propose. Two, you take away reasons for them NOT to bite your lure. By this I mean, they are predators and hunting/eating is what they do. But if something isn't "right", they become cautious and don't eat the bait. For example, "is my bait thumping just right?", "is my bait flashing too much or too little?", "Did I just spray my hands with OFF to repel mosquitos and get some on my bait that the fish can sense?", "Did my shadow spook the fish when I went into a figure 8?", "Did my foot thump the bottom of the boat when I moved", etc, etc.

A predator like a Musky is evolved to be efficient. They will expend the least amount of energy for the maximum gain. So, I believe when they follow, they started out wanting to eat/kill, but something is just not right (which makes them not eat). If they didn't want to eat/kill, they wouldn't waste the energy chasing the bait; these are the days when you see very few fish. So, what we have to do is minimize ways for them not to eat. In addition, you have to maximize ways for them to eat (for example, a figure 8 triggers them because maybe they think the prey is getting away OR maybe a whacky colored bait triggers a strike for whatever reason...maybe they got pissed off?).

So, minimize ways for them not to eat, maximize ways for them to eat (like all of the reasons I mentioned above). By adding scent, it's a calculated risk, right? If it's not "proven", then it may actually be a deterrent for them to eat! But at the same time, if it syncs up with their every day predatory experience (i.e. they are eating ciscoes and it smells like a cisco), then maybe it would work.

At the end of the day, I think the "frontier" in terms of "scent" fishing lies not with spreading our baits with fish oils, or some kind of "fish parts sauce". Rather, I believe that fish/prey in distress release some sort of pheromone or "distress signal". It's a chemical "trail" that predators pick up and it signals, EASY MEAL. This is why you hear the stories of predators like pike and musky grabbing walleye, trout, or that smaller pike on the end of our lines. The lateral line stimulation of the thrashing "prey" (trout, walleye, bass) combines with the chemical distress signal...and the predator moves in for the kill. If this chemical/pheromone could be bottled and used in the right amount, I think it would be a huge trigger.

Just my $0.02.

-Dan

[Rob Manthei]

I've messed around with scents for several years night fishing. Yeah, maybe it helped a little, but I really didn't see a huge difference in the amount of catch after dark....I did learn never to add scent to marabou...


For one thing, how long does the scent stay attached to a lure such as a depth raider? Is it enought to provoke a strike that wouldn't happen?


Why does a fish come in hot on a lure and then not eat? If you think about it, when those days happen, it seems like everyone is having the same results...I believe this is the characteristic of muskies..

Reminds me of a day last October on Eagle.....Us, Mikie, Cal, Herbie, Scotty, Scott all had multiple sucker hits that day....from one end of the lake to the other....we personally saw 2 of the hits(50'' fish) and I know we got one fish, Cal got a fish, and all the others were either wiffs or on and off in a second...how does a musky that can eat a 12 to 16" sucker in a heartbeat decide that they only want to tail grab or head grab instead of the truely aggressive manor of T-boning the sucker.??? Sure, if there weren't hooks in the sucker the musky could have easily moved off and swallowed it...but for the sake of arguement, what caused that day of 12 to 16 fish to act in the same manor all over the lake?

Enough thought........Cast, figure-8, cast, figure-8, again, again, ......

[esoxaddict]

Muskies typically don't feed by scent, that is true. Would it make the difference once in a great while? It might, but I've seen muskies swim right up and stare at a sucker, something that IS food, and STILL not eat it. As far as I am concerned, followers are just fish waiting to be coaxed into eating. In the case of double 10's? Of course something isn't right. It's a thing moving through the water that doesn't really move, look, sound, or act like anything they normally eat. Triggering that feeding reponse to me is just another piece of the "make this think look as real as possible" puzzle. When you make a rapid change in speed and direction, that's EXACTLY what a fleeing prey fish does in an attempt to escape, and it's that moment that usually causes the muskie to eat. Think about where they usually eat on the figure 8, high and on the outside. In the second or two prior to that, that lure has turned off like a bait fish would, sped up like a bait fish would, and headed torawrds the surface like a bait fish would. That's what fish DO when they are being pursued. At that moment, if that muskie wants to eat it has to commit, or that prey fish will escape. It's what they are conditioned to do, and it's what they have encountered their entire lives in the act of feeding. They see a prey fish that's close enough and either ambush it before it knows what hit it, or they chase it and it tries to escape, and they chase it down and eat it.

In nature, I doubt you will EVER see a fish being pursued that just swims along at the same speed and doesn't try to aviod being eaten, but that's exactly what we are doing reeling in a lure for 50 yards or more.

Think about where in the cast your muskies have been caught. Seems to me it's always right away or at the boat. Herbie is right -- they can swim in short bursts of spped at what, 40MPH? You can't reel that fast. If they want to eat that lure, they're going to crush it. If they haven't eaten it by the time you see them, chances are they aren't going to unless you make that appear more like food than it already does. The only way to do that is to make that lure do what everything else they've chased and eaten did.