Fishing Baits Secrets To Treble Your Carp And Catfish Catches!
October 28th, 2008 by Tim RichardsonIt might sound strange to imagine a fish as a tongue, but that is what they are in effect in water; and exploiting this fact is well proven to catch you a shocking amount of fish! Too many anglers think like anglers instead of seeing and sensing things from a fish perspective and this often is the difference between an average angler and a big-name one! It’s the substances leaching and dissolving into water from your baits that seriously impact on specialised taste and smell cells, (plus other senses) all over the external and internal surfaces of fish and realising that this is similar to taste buds on your tongue is something you can hugely exploit with bait to totally transform your catches…
Carp and catfish often live in the same waters and are targeted by anglers fishing in similar ways for each so I’ll place these together. A good reason to use catfish and carp together as examples of tongues that swim is the sheer number of physical similarities in substance detection and also their shared quite similar essential nutritional needs that often means the same bait design can catch both; and very big ones too! Many anglers know little about the specifically adapted cells in and outside of fish that enable them to detect substances in water on a chemical level even down to a few parts in a million or even billion, and this is one of the most powerful aspects of fish we can exploit with our baits to make them far easier to catch!
I always laugh when I see someone sniffing a bottle of flavour, or tasting a bait, because this is really a measure of personal preference, rather that scientific testing of how a substance actually triggers feeding intensity or not in water, plus our senses are dulled compared to fishes by a gigantic percentage; these are the bloodhounds of the water world! We taste and smell using specially adapted cells in our tongues and noses; these have wet surfaces at all times to enable use to detect substances effectively in air, but fish evolved such cells all over their bodies, as well as internally, so they are like big tongues really. Specialist fish cells are part of many vital sensory input systems are found in various areas of concentration and cell forms; for detection of various substances, and other input information, like water temperature and pressure waves from your lead almost hitting them etc!
It is noticeable that carp will detect various substances using cells and groups of cells that are specially adapted for the purpose, detecting particular essential amino acids especially well in certain combinations for instance. To detect foods and your bait substances special cells are found in fish in the skin, the face and head, the lips, barbels, fins, nose, mouth, throat and so on. You might wonder how carp detect oils in water, but even these are very slightly soluble and adding lecithins is an important point here too!
Apart from cells involved in chemical detection in the water better known in olfaction and chemoreception, there are many others, such as the specialised lateral line pit cells. These continue from the tale, along the flanks and down around the eye and along the bottom of the jaw ending very near the mouth. These are so vital to Cyprindae fish for example, that the jaw of these fish is shaped to allow this distribution of nerves and sensory pit arrangements from millions of years ago in their evolution.
Over all the various systems and their different functions combined act like a biological radar system and enable the fish to be as aware as possible of its surroundings. Fish can detect the surrounding water oxygen concentration or dissolved carbonic acid concentration in various times of year and seasons. A lowered carbonic acid concentration in water on the end of a strong oxygenating warming south-westerly wind in the UK for instance, can often lead to fish preferring the water conditions where the bank faces this wind.
Carp and catfish have barbels; the highly sensitive projections around the mouth that in one role, help them find food and these have some of the highest densities of cells adapted for receiving chemical feedback from the water in solution. Your bait substances imbibe water or dissolve in water to form solutions. These substances have a highest concentration nearest their source and this gets weaker as you travel away from it.
Fish are able to detect these solutions and home in and follow the concentrations back to where they are highest and so find your free baits and hook baits for example. This is where balanced nutritional baits and nutritionally boosted readymade baits can really do manipulate fish feeding behaviours and dominate fisheries and catches! This is especially in the case where as many essential needs are covered as possible in a bait; so giving your fish multiple essential reasons to eat your bait and all the so-called bio-active substances used in baits all add to this impact!
Carp and catfish senses are the key to manipulating their feeding and location behaviours in your favour and anglers who truly appreciate this often make catching great numbers of fish look easy and are able to certainly gain huge advantages over other anglers competing baits and their methods of application by constantly adapting with the fish! Many leading anglers truly appreciate how to leverage and adapt their baits because they know enough about exploiting carp senses and behaviour to do this and often to maximum effect, and it costs you very little to multiply your catches for life when you find (and utilise) the right information!
By Tim Richardson.

