A little tid bit posted by a friend…..

attached copy:
Some university as i recall had a holding pond full of smallmouths of the same year class. Once they were large enough to be caught on hook and line they were angled for on a regular basis with artificials. Each time a fish was caught it was marked in some fashion. After several seasons the pond was drained and the fish recovered. Approximately half the fish had never been caught . The other half was composed of fish which had been caught several…. or MANY times.

Other details either escape my memory or were not enumerated in the article. This study suggests to me that those fish that were succeptable to angling stayed that way and did not become wary of artificials.Others from the outset simply were not “biters.” I would guess that the biters enjoyed a better growth rate than the non biters, though in a harvested environ ment they might not have lived long enough to enjoy that growth! Lots of implications and questions here eh?

— any thoughts.
jc

could it be that the fish that didn’t bite were simply not aggressive. In nature you have many specieces where some are aggressive and others are docile. you find it in people even. Also it could be darwinism. the fish that are agressive survive and the half that arent arent meant to live. the only other possibility is that maybe the fish that did not bite needed something to trigger them into biting. different fish get triggered into biting by different lures. i’m sure you know that from fishing experience what one fish might not touch the one next to it will hammer. it could be a similar concept in that pond.

maybe?

good fishing to all

JC, do you recall if all the fish were from the same genes. I have read some articles stating that some are more leary/wiser of artificials than are others. Thus, this would give the same results found in your article. The ones that were “wiser” to the artificials were never caught, and the others were being caught all of the time because they could never put two and two together. It could be a trait inherited from their parents. Which could actually be the larger ones, because they are not being “harvested”. Food for thought…..

From what I know of the intellect of the bass in general is that they can be conditioned to shy away from artificials in a very small scope and outside of that scope they lose that ability. Tests from Berkley show fish had a maximum of 10 days where many were limited to only a couple days and some were repeat offenders. What this study reflects to me is that for some reason many of the fish were more adapt at determining what is food and what is not OR they were so in tune with the forage base that they were only keying on a specific forage type.
When you fish a jig or a wedge tail minnow I (of superior intellect I think) would be hard pressed to tell the different if there was significant movement. On the other hand one would assume that these fish may be only relating to crayfish in which case the speed and means of capture might be the key. I hear tale of walleyes being caught in the winter and when filleted having frogs and crayfish in there bellies along with mud. These same fish often show signs of a marred lower jaw suggesting they might be burrowing out the forage. In this case BASS would likely be hard to catch unless you matched the presentation and I don’t think any of us has time to go burry our baits in hopes that a fish will come along and dig it out which leads me to my next point of which maybe specific gene pools are less opportunistic than others.
We can formulate that if half of the given fish in an ecosystem will not eat our artificials then over time our fishing results will decline.

I am hoping some of our bio friends have or have seen studies involving more data.
Jc

JC,
In response to your post about the “biters” versus “non-biters” in the study you refered to, I have these comments. Your version of the study is vague and does not contain the usual level of detail that you are famous for on this thread and I did not see a copy attached. Secondly, your implication that fish are predisposed from birth to be either biters or non-biters as far as artificials go is in my opinion a stretch at best. I believe that fish are conditioned in their responses and that some fish either live in an environment that they have been conditioned to eat a certain food such as crawfish or shad and they key on these forages or they are equal opportunity eaters and will try to eat a variety of things including some things that are not edible like sticks, vegetation, beer cans, etc. and they learn from putting these things in their mouth that they are not on the menu after their initial or subsequent attempts at eating them. Thirdly, the fish in this pond that were not caught obviously ate something in the pond to stay alive and that conditioning may be a factor in their reluctance to eating artificial baits presented to them. I am sure with the amount of fishing that you appear to do that you have caught some large specimens that did not show evidence of previous hook marks in their mouth and that these specimens were also usually very healthy looking. These fish were in my opinion conditioned early on to a certain food base in a certain location. This could be the key to the pond study, maybe the shallow living fish were the ones that were caught because the artificials that were offered to them were only offered to a select portion of the water column and never reached the deeper living fish? Maybe the non-biters were conditioned early on to an invertebrate diet and were presented only with “fishlike” artificials and these same fish may have had a negative experience with another fish forage when they were young such as trying to eat another small bass and almost choking on it due to the size? Lots of variables here to evaluate and not enough information to substantiate these hypotheses. In closing, your last statement about growth rates of biters versus non-biters in a harvest environment not living long enough to enjoy the growth is contradictory in that if a fish was a non-biter and would not take artificials it would never be caught!!

P.S. I do believe that certain fish are catchable many times as I have done it while others are not as reproducable or suseptible to being caught again and again. I wish they had little signs on them so during tourneys we could just go back for the multiple biters and not waste time on the one-timers!

This seems like one of the more interesting technical discussions. With a little thought, it doesn’t surprise me one bit that about half of the fish in a pond environment are never caught. It probably has as much to do with the fish’s predisposition to be where the other’s aren’t as anything. Just because you’re catching a fish on every cast in the slop doesn’t mean that they are all in the slop – it may be just the biters.

Even more interesting would be what the effect would be of a river environment. I suspect that the percentages would be much different, with maybe 70-80% of the fish never being caught. Seems that in rivers, fishing pressure is concentrated in a very small portion of the total available water.

Just to clarify the attached copy was the actual information given to me. (not my words) .
What I was hoping for mostly was for someone whom had some experience or information about this or subsequent studies of this nature to chine in.
I agree with your conclusions that the info is vague at best. I do challenge these results as anyone with considerable intellect would.
My thoughts were, if given the fact that only ½ were biters I for the life of me can not really attribute the reasoning to anything but preferred forage base. I assume the study was properly conducted which even to me is a stretch at best. I think we all know my feelings about Grant Leach.
Clearly I have to concede that we need more info.

I will do a little searching to see if I can get definitive results along with methods of collecting this data and post my results.
Thanks for Chining in and I look forward to continued discussions.
Jc