Theories On Fish Sight

Oh Christmas! The bass are sleeping, but the trout are awake and lively here in Virginia. How the long days of summer are so far away. While there is less time for fishing, at least there is more than enough time for meditation. Lately in these slow days I have been focusing on trying to unlock the mystery of what lure makes a fish swirl with excitement. The difference a small change in a lure's shape makes is a befuddling riddle of the psyche of fish. This past week I was given the opportunity to test some of my theories and found some surprising results, plus a limit of trout in less than an hour.

Gary Yamamoto Senko

It all begins with the Senko (pictured above). What is it about this lure which is so enticing to many species of predator fish? One popular theory is that its shape is similar to a small fish, and on its slow unweighted decent it mimics a dying bait fish. Well, it doesn't look like a small fish to me! I see something more like a wet cigar. Regardless of what my eyes see, experience makes me want to agree that something about this shape is very fish-like in the eyes of a fish.

Perhaps seeing how successful the Senko is at catching fish as compared to other fish-like shapes is a clue into how fish see the world. So I compared the Senko to other shapes that I felt were strangely effective, shapes that made fish seemingly irrational with hunger. I took some of these shapes and performed some unscientific tests to see the reaction of fish. The results were surprising.

Bobby Garland Baby Shad

The champion of the tests was a minnow-colored crappie bait that caught trout like I hadn't seen before. The bait was a Arkie Sexee Shad, which is a clone of the Bobby Garland Baby Shad, a popular crappie bait. In the bass world, it would be called a tiny jerk bait. I don't care what you call it, it looks like a booger to me.

I had chosen this bait to test a theory I had about the way fish see. I hadn't heard of trout biting a bait like this before, but if my theory was correct, they would go nuts over it. My hypothesis was simple: fish recognize objects differently than humans. Sort of like how deer can't see color, I hypothesized that fish can't see texture.

Let's back up a minute and talk about human sight. If you've ever seen some of the wild tricks the human brain can play in an optical illusion, you know that the human brain isn't perfect either. Tricks are the "bugs" in the way our brains interpret what we see. These bugs are caused by our brains making short cuts that are supposed to help us in most circumstances.

I theorized that fish have bigger shortcuts, and one was that they recognize objects based mostly on the silhouette and color. Imagine if everything you saw was like different shapes of construction paper with no definition inside. Look at a car and see a blue car-shape with no details. That paints a good picture of the way I was theorizing that fish see.

Going off that hypothesis, the Senko's effectiveness could be explained because it matches' the profile of the top of a bass. The shape is similar, and the most common green color is like a large mouth's topside. I conjectured that a bass looking at a Senko sees the top of a bass (or some kind of green fish) from every angle. The fish's brain fills in the rest of the picture like how our brains will fill in the blank in an optical illusion.

Our mind has shortcuts, and a fish's does as well

To test the hypothesis, I chose the Baby Shad shape to fish trout because it has similar characteristics to a Senko. It has no definition, and the profile and color are similar to a fish's. According to my hypothesis, they should bite. I tested it against a more traditionally shaped Gulp 1" minnow and orange floating trout powerworms.

Sufficed to say, the Baby Shad shape was the most effective. Where with the powerworm there was an occasional follower, and the gulp minnow would draw 1 or 2 followers on most casts, the Baby Shad could draw 10 fish in a swirling mass from the same hole.

What can be taken from this inconclusive finding? Here are my speculations:

• The most instinctually ingrained shape in a fish's brain is "fish" because fish are a universal forage and predator
• Profile is the most important characteristic of a lure
• Color is the second most important characteristic, and should duplicate forage
• Less definition is better in a lure because it does not distract from the illusion
• A monochrome 2-axis symmetry lure (like the Senko) is better than a laminate 1-axis symmetry lure (like the BGBS) because the monochrome lure appears the same from all angles