Keith Jones is the director of research for industry giant Pure Fishing, so he knows a thing or two about fish sensory perception and behavior.
In studying the size, shape and color of attractive lures, he discovered that bass have a preference for cylindrical soft plastics that are 4 to 5 inches long and a half-inch thick. In fact, he noted that those cylinders worked best with bass slightly less than 2 pounds. Anything skinnier or fatter or longer or shorter were rejected more frequently.
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As with his research on accepted crayfish shapes, Jones worked with bass that had never seen a worm ? or crayfish ? and thus were reacting instinctively rather than from learned behavior.
Color and color reception in bass also has been researched. Years ago, when the ubiquitous blue-and-purple worms were the lures of any self-respecting and serious bass aficionado, research suggested that bass do not see well in the ultraviolet range of the color spectrum. The supposition was that bass might be seeing blue or purple worms as “fuzzy” and thus hit any moving blue or purple item on the off chance that it might be tasty. After all, fish have atrocious table manners, immediately blowing out anything they don?t like or judge not fit to eat.
Jones does not like the “fuzzy-blue” theory. “It sounds a little anthropomorphic,” he said, explaining that sometimes humans attribute human concepts to the brains of fish to try to explain their scaly behavior.
But vision works differently in different critters. Humans have three retinal color cones ? red, green and blue. Jones notes that bass have only two color cones ? red and green. The result is that anything in the blue/violet/purple range will be seen as some shade of black or gray ? not the color we see when buying a lure and not “fuzzy” as earlier researchers opined.
More research by Jones proved that while bass seem to have no marked preference for any particular lure color (although red and orange were poorly received), they have a marked preference for two-toned lures painted silver and black. Could their attraction to blue/violet food colors be because they see them as gray-toned and react accordingly?
You can find a wealth of information on bass fishing tactics from Jones? book “Knowing Bass” (Lyons Press). For bass fishermen, it?s a book worth reading ? maybe even twice.
C. Boyd Pfeiffer is an internationally known sportsman and award-winningwriter on fishing, hunting and the outdoors. He can be reached at [email protected].
