Fishing lures are designed with at least two purposes in mind, first and foremost involves profit motive, last but not least is to attract fish. Tackle companies, directed by marketing surveys and focus groups, know that it is we the human species and not the fish are the ones with deep pockets. They also know that our attention is mainly lured by color, flash, big name endorsements and smart packaging. This strutting the goods can be called the “peacock effect”. On the other hand, the fish are just looking for a quick, easy, tasty snack. Well, it’s time to put the hype and flash behind and look at fast food from the fish’s viewpoint.

To do this we went to Dr. Dan Rittschof, a zoologist at the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort North Carolina, specializing in chemical and behavioral ecology. Fish are comprised of mostly muscles surrounding a complex series of vital organs similar to ours, all designed for preservation of self and species alike, but what sorts of sensory inputs do fish have and how can we match them with the baits that we’re trying to use to catch them? “First of all,” said Rittschof, “the three ones that I know about are vision, vibration and chemical sensing.”

In basic terms, like us, fish taste and smell, they can hear and feel and they see and we need to trigger as many of these senses to first get the attention of a fish and then elicit a strike. Let’s start with taste and smell. “If you’re going to use chemistry,” said Rittschof, “first you can put down a lure that sits in some place and stinks, and the fish is going to locate it because it smells.” But in this case you can’t move it, because if you move it…then you’re lying to the fish, because he can’t find it then. This is one feature of why scented baits are so effective, but not the only or most important one.

“ When the fish finds our bait,” said Rittschof, “we have to hook it before it figures out what we presented is not food.” “The easiest way to go is with (real) food, it’s hard,” Rittschof mused, for a fish to figure out food isn’t food.” “Most fish verify what they put in their mouth is food is not by texture. Fish eat spiny hard things all the time. Baby turtles get eaten all the time, they’re hard. Sea turtles are hard. Birds are hard and fuzzy, lobsters are hard, and crabs are hard, very hard, although they like the molted ones better. There are lots of hard things that fish eat.” “So if it looks like food,” said Rittschof, and it tastes like food they will eat it.”

“ The key,” Rittschof noted, “is that if a lure tastes like it’s food changes how the fish processes and handles the bait once it gets in the mouth. It gives you a chance to hook it before it can spit it out. If you look at videos of bass, a bass will take something by taking it in its mouth and then start the process of spitting it out virtually immediately if it doesn’t taste right. If it tastes right, it closes its mouth, pushes in its gill covers, turns its head and starts to swallow, and that’s when you hook effectively.”

We all know that scented baits work and there are many, many alternatives in the tackle shops, everyone seems have to have their own flavored juice, but how about sound, that is vibration? “It’s amazing how well you can hear under water,” said Rittschof “and all sorts of fish make sounds when they breed. I’m sure you’ve heard croaker, croak. Fish communicate socially too, and from an early age. That’s how they keep track of where everybody is. So baits that have vibrations in them, if they’re the right kind of vibrations, work.” “That’s why things like Rat-L-Trap baits and sounding baits work so well,” said Rittschof.

That is, bait (a.k.a., food) is noisy, and noisy baits “tuned” to the fish, can act as potent fish attractants. Shrimp snap, menhaden slap, croakers croak and the sound of an injured finger mullet must make a redfish smack its lips. And so it goes, the not so silent sound of food. Some of our favorite (i.e., effective) lures snap, crackle and pop. Rat-L-Traps, Top Dogs, rattlers, vibrators, buzzers, poppers and spinners alike all broadcast to foraging fish that food is close at hand. We also know that some un-bait-like sounds are detrimental and will often spook fish, that’s why stealth is often part of our good fishing habits.

“ That brings up another point,” said Rittschof. “Nobody’s really studied it, we really don’t know what’s going on, but it’s clear that there are some boats that work better than others, and it’s related to how their engines are working, the speed that they idle, the speed that they are trolling. If you think of where you put your lures, you’re not scaring fish with those sounds, and maybe in fact attracting them to your boat.”

So how about vision? Thinking about attracting and catching fish, Rittschof said, “Smell and sound can bring a fish to the area, but the most important sense for a strike is vision.” When you think of vision, you think things that look alive, which for predators works really, really well,” said Rittschof.

Of course putting life into your fake bait is also partly the angler’s responsibility, and underlies the importance of proper and skilled presentation of such bogus baits. “Natural prey that are damaged work well because they don’t have a good avoidance mechanism” said Rittschof, “and lures that are fished correctly don’t have a good avoidance mechanism either!”

“ Then when you think about color, there are two ways to think about color,” said Rittschof. “One is that some fish like bass (largemouth bass) actually do use color, that’s been shown in the literature, but mainly, the color of the lure impacts in its relation to the background.”

So is color is really providing contrast, not really color for color’s sake? To this Rittschof answered, “Right, it’s the contrast between that (i.e. the bait) and the background. And then you really have to know what your animal does and how it works. If it’s a visual predator that sits and waits, then you can attract it with a visual lure with something with flash for example.”
Contrast also comes into play at night. “I love to fish for bass at night,” said Rittschof. “I don’t do much marine fishing, but I love to fish for bass at night and surface lures at night work incredibly well, where the fish are hitting the bait from below, and they can actually can see pretty well from below.”

If you think of it, fishes’ eyes are mostly up on top of their heads, to the extreme is the flounder, but often they’re looking up at food. And that contrast or bait silhouette above them is very important. This is reinforced by the axiom, that you should use bright colors on bright days, dark colors on dark days. It almost sounds counter intuitive, but if you are trying to maximize the contrast between your waterlogged bait and the background sky above, it almost starts to make sense. Darker than dark, lighter than light! That is why one of the most effective MirrOlures in catching citation speckled trout during the deep, dank, dreary, dark of night is the jet-black Night Stalker. The keen eyesight of the trout helps, but background and contrast play key roles too.

Finally, lets consider the illusive nature of color under water and what happens in dark, dingy or dirty water? Light is absorbed by water according to wavelength with the longer wave radiation; RED light is absorbed first, followed by ORANGE, YELLOW and GREEN, with the maximum transmission being for shortest wavelength of BLUE light. This accounts for the disappearance of color from lures with increasing depth, because the color of light must be present to be reflected back to your eyes, in order to be seen. So, by 10 to 20 feet in depth, red grays into black, whereas blues hold true even at 60 feet. This is the case for clear water, but waters that contain high amounts of colored or suspended particulate material are another matter. The colors that maintain their color-ness best are green and yellow and certainly chartreuse.

Rittschof’s experience verifies this, “Fish that are in deeper water, color is probably not that important,” said Rittschof. “It’s probably contrast. In fact, when we looked at it, we did a little work offshore with plastic and cut bait on bottom fish, and plastic works as well as cut bait offshore …white plastic that is.”

Finally I asked Dr. Rittschof, if he were to develop an artificial bait, what kinds of features would he key in on as far as its design? He said, in a hard plastic bait, what you will do is provide some silhouette that looks like bait, have it move like bait and have it taste like bait.” Taste like bait, that’s certainly a challenge for a hard plastic bait! Rittschof responded to that saying, “I even talked with a bait company a while ago,” said Rittschof, “on new ideas on how to deliver flavor with hard plastic artificial baits, and I actually suggested something almost like a Pez dispenser! A Pez candy dispenser? Remember them? A Pez MirrOlure? Maybe someday.

So the next time you wander your local tackle shop, or browse your favorite catalog for some truly effective lures, think size and shape, presentation, sensory triggers, sparkle, flash and a splash of color. This will help you simplify your tackle box and hopefully catch more fish too.