Bass Fishing Jun - Jul 2020 | Page 53

By TJ Maglio PHOTO BY ROB MATSUURA UNDERSTANDING LEARNED BEHAVIOR IN GAME FISH CAN REVEAL BETTER TACTICS FOR CATCHING BASS ON PRESSURED LAKES Oftentimes, critical thinking is what separates the best anglers from all the rest. The most successful of us spend ample time researching the most recent articles and commentary, poring over fisheries reports and aerial photos, and lingering long hours at the ramp after a derby, decompressing and yukking it up about what those “silly green fish” are doing. Call it what you want – camaraderie, commiseration or even amateur research – but it’s safe to say the majority of bass anglers have spent at least the occasional drive back from the lake (tail tucked firmly between their legs) pondering what the bass were thinking. For that matter, do bass even think? It’s a fairly safe bet that they do; just not in the way humans or even other more advanced lifeforms than fish, such as apes, dolphins and crows, do. How do we know bass think? We can tell by observing fish interacting with their environments and how they make the hundreds of tiny choices they make every day to go about their lives; things like swimming up to hide under a dock instead of the laydown next to it. Take a bedding bass, for example. Why is it the fish bites on the 15th pitch to the same spot, rather than the third or 16th or 25th? It’s because the fish made a choice to bite your bait on that specific pitch. Assume you fish a small lake or pond and you know there are 500 bass in it. Why is it that you catch one on a spinnerbait right away, proceed to throw it all day and only catch a handful more? One bass ate it. If they weren’t unique individuals making independent choices, it stands to reason you should have caught all 500, right? It’s the understanding of the mechanisms behind these “fish thoughts,” as well as research on social interactions, physiological oddities and their relative moods, that comprises the frontier of fisheries biology. JUNE-JULY 2020 | MAJORLEAGUEFISHING.COM | FLWFISHING.COM 51