by Martyn Russ
In this feature we take a quick look at the science behind bait choice, how carp see different colours within water and how noise can effect your fishing. We have taken information from the best bait companies on the market, fish breeders & farmers and even the science behind it all.
How many times have anglers asked what baits are best for a particular venue?, or when is it best to use fishy baits? What makes you choose from Sweet Baits to Spicy baits, what works best at certain times of the year? All these questions sound familiar?
When it comes to selecting a bait for a venue to target specimen fish the first thing to ensure is that any bait you choose is a "High Quality" bait and has a High Nutritional content that will be beneficial to the carp. Not only will this be more healthy for the fish you are targeting but because of the H.N.V (high nutritional value) of the bait it will be far more attractive to the fish than standard home made boilies.
When it comes to selecting the make up of the bait a little common sense goes a long way. When we hit the colder weather and fishing becomes more difficult as the fish are less active its more important to be exact with your baiting application. Choosing a high oil content in cold water will work against you as the oils will solidify in colder temperatures meaning that the attraction of the bait will not be as good as it would be in hotter weather so selecting fish-meal baits for example in winter will mean you have less chance of catching compared to the guy using a bird seed or bird-food based bait with no oils. It doesn't mean the won't work at all, far from it as i have seen oily baits work in frozen waters but it does mean you will have less attraction and less working for you in order to attract the fish to get the bite in the first place.
For this reason i follow some simple rules to baits over the year and that is Low in oil high in nutrition and attraction in winter (birdseed based and natural food based baits) and then for summer i can move across to a good fish-meal based bait with loads of oil and attraction leaking out to help attract the fish. With a lot of modern baits its not as difficult as it used to be and now days you are able to find baits that will work all year round for you but you should always double check, and if a bait starts to slow down or the bites dry up as winter rolls in then change!.
With the help of nutritional scientists, animal nutritionists and a bank of experience built up over almost three decades, we’ve got right down to the essential understanding – and it is this……
Carp have been recognised as one of the most intelligent fish, since the the time of Izaak Walton in the 17th century where he dubbed it the ‘wiliest of fish’.
Of all the senses, the carp’s most acute is its smell. Its vision is good, but plays second to the ability to trace molecules of scent suspended in the water – at rates of only a few molecules per million - and in any case its vision is often hampered in unclear water.
The carp’s feeding is driven by instinctual capabilities, which, although not ‘thoughtful’ in the human sense of the word, are none the less highly competent ways of seeking out nutrition which will benefit it. The ‘knowledge’ is accumulated in millions of years of coding in the carp’s DNA - it actually senses what is better nutrition and can discern this through chemo-receptors – at the base of a ‘u-bend’ channel in the snout. There, a ‘rosette’ of chemo-receptor cells - up to half a million in a square millimetre -can detect not only the aroma but the nutritional quality and therefore contribution of food. Carp have many more receptor cells than most other fish, and pass information back to the instinctual part of the brain, which assesses it against its ‘database’ built up in the DNA of the fish since time immemorial.
HOW DOES THIS IMPACT ON BAIT?
Carp know what’s good for them, and make their selection accordingly, preferring relevance and quality of nutrition over poorer quality food stuffs.
If there is anything unnatural, the carp will sense it.
If the bait smells attractive, but has little innate nutritional value, the carp will pass over it in favour of a bait which does – and in lakes which have reasonable to high fishing pressure and lots of available food, the carp is inclined to be highly selective in what it does and doesn’t choose. High nutritional content will win every time.
This allied to its natural wariness as a species, means that bait has to be both a powerful attractant to get past first base and come to the attention of the fish. Then it has to match up to a nutritional screening to be chosen over other available bait.
It is often felt that fish become ‘habituated’ to a certain bait within lakes - choosing them as though by habit because they have been ‘ok’ on past experiences. There is some truth in this. However, many tests have shown that the nutritional quality of the bait can cause Carp to switch preferences - and so if the angler uses a higher nutritional quality bait, he is in many senses deploying an unfair advantage.
Summer, Autumn, Winter How to make the bait changes....
As the air temperature starts to cool in late September and continues to fall through the autumn months, the water temperature soon begins to follow suit. In time, the water’s temperature falls to a point where fish-meal boilies cease to effectively leak their attraction into the water column, making them much harder for the carp to locate. The cooling of the water also starts to affect the carp’s metabolism making fish-meals a lot more difficult for them to digest.
One proven tactic in the early autumn is to begin to introduce a limited quantity of your chosen winter boilie alongside the last of your summer boilies, upping the amount of winter boilies added to your loose feed each time you visit the lake. This process works to slowly wean the fish onto a more digestible winter bait that they will continue to eat right through the coldest part of the year, helping to keep them visiting the targeted area to seek out food for longer.
Towards the end of the autumn as the days grow shorter and less of the sun’s energy is absorbed by the water, depending upon the venue, the fish will often start to frequent the shallowest areas of the lake less and less, preferring to hold up in the deeper water where the temperature is more stable. As cold water naturally sinks, the fish start to spend much of their time swimming around in the middle layers within these areas where they find it most comfortable. Around this time, a spread of highly soluble, high leakage winter bait will often be the difference between success and failure.
By the end of December, most venues will have experienced their first ground frost and the water temperatures will have started to stabilise around their winter low. The fish will likely be close to their winter torpor, feeding for short periods at certain times of the night or day. With this in mind, it is often sensible to consider this in your baiting approach.
When it comes to catching carp in the winter, there are few winter carp baits that will continue to produce consistently and although they seem to work exceptionally well at any time of the year, they really do come into their own through the colder months. If you want to keep catching through the most difficult time of the year the stick to boilies that are low in oil, high in nutritional value and have a good catch record within the colder months.
Seeing Colours ....... Be careful with bait colour and concentrate on being silent.
The light spectrum is well known. “Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vane” is an acronym used to remember the colours from one end to the other. From left to right the letters stand for: Red,Orange,Yellow, Green, Blue,Indigo, and Violet. A mixture of all the colours makes white light. That is, if one were to take 7 flashlights, each of which was giving off one of the listed colours, and shine all the different lights on a white wall, the spot of light would be white! A white
Water acts as a selective filter. If a white light is suspended above a tank of water that was 100 ft deep the colours from the white light would be filtered out selectively (one-by-one) as one descends. It is gradual. There is no abrupt interface. For example, most of the red is gone from the light after 10 feet. Some of the orange is gone after 10 / 12 ft, less of the yellow is lost, etc. At 25 ft most of the orange is gone. At 35 ft most of the yellow is gone.
This continues through the spectrum until all that is left is violet light and that fades out after 100 ft ish. Now take into account that most of our lakes are full of dark green algae, which acts as another filter, scattering the light waves even further. So, at the bottom of a lake the colour of your bait is NOT what it appears at the surface. Your brightly coloured new bait looks a strange shade of grey in the middle of a deep lake, and in just 10 ft of water its colour has started to change. The only highly coloured baits that you can rely on 100% of the time are fluorescent. The only non florescent colour is violet. Please be very careful with bait colour.
Making Sense of the Noise ....
In relation to sound, noise is not necessarily random. Sounds, particularly loud ones that disturb people or make it difficult to hear wanted sounds, are noise, conversations of other people may be called ‘noise’ by those not involved in the conversation; any unwanted sound is always, noise’!
Carp are not dolphins. We can’t train them to jump through hoops, or to swim with children, they have no more intelligence than any other species of the same evolutionary group. Carp are crafty not clever. This said, carp have an inbuilt evolutionary sense for danger developed over millennia, and the ability to learn from past experience and adapt those memories in a way which makes them extremely risk averse. Carp learn to associate certain situations with danger; it has been witnessed time and again, on a variety of waters, by thousands of anglers.
The lack of actual scientific research is irrelevant, as anglers we observe their behaviour patterns constantly, we all know that carp are more than capable of figuring out which areas of the water are safe and which are not, at any given time of the day.
Over time carp can and do figure out what to pick up, and what to leave well alone, so the intellectual capacity of carp is still up for debate. But one thing is certain, observe the behaviour patterns of big carp for long enough and you will see tell-tale patterns in their behaviour which only a creature with intelligence portrays.
Carp hate noise - period.
There are several factors which when combined will help you ‘blank’ repeatedly, but its noise that is the most damaging factor in my humble opinion; noise must be considered and avoided when you’re out chasing big carp. Before bait, rigs, flavors, and the latest Gucci tackle, noise levels are the most important factor in your fishing session. Location is a contender for the top spot; you can’t catch fish if they are not there, but its noise that will end your session when they are there, if you are not very very careful. Avoid making noise, and people who produce noise at all costs
The science of sound
Sound travels faster in liquids than in gases because molecules are more tightly packed together. In fresh water, sound waves travel at 1,482 meters per second (about 3,315 mph). That’s well over 4 times faster than in air! In layman’s terms this is the blink of an eye. How many times have you set up on showing fish, made a bit of commotion and seen the fish disappear to the middle or the opposite side of the water. Carp rely upon sound waves to communicate with each other and to locate food. The reason that carp are able to find the smallest of food items like shrimp, snails, blood-worm and other creepy crawlies can be rounded down to a couple of main reasons.
1. The carp’s ability to taste its food.
2. The carp’s awesome ability to detect the smallest of sounds.
Weberian Ossicles
The carp’s ability to hear sound is made possible by the ‘Weberian bone structure’ which is unique to the Carp species.
The Weberian apparatus functions by transmitting auditory signals straight from the gas bladder, through the Weberian ossicles and then straight into the labyrinth structures of the inner ear. The structure essentially acts as an amplifier of sound waves that would otherwise be only slightly perceivable by the inner ear structure alone. With the added function of the swim bladder as a resonating chamber, signals are amplified to noticeable levels giving Carp excellent hearing.
So the next time you’re on the water, smashing it to a foam with your marker, or crashing around in the margins with your bank sticks, or throwing your tackle down and running about like it’s going out of fashion, remember- you have just given yourself away! You have succeeded in making you’re session more difficult than it needed to be.
There are no magic baits – no short cuts. Your ability to catch carp consistently requires training, commitment, knowledge and determination. Do not go with the flow and stay away from the pack. How many of the alpha males on your local water are catching carp consistently? Wisdom gained from years of experience can’t be learnt overnight, but you can help yourself by doing things correctly. Time on the water, a carp-bait and good location are all important. However, it’s not spooking fish by being noisy which will make or break your carp fishing journey. Keep the noise levels to a minimum and you may just catch the fish of a lifetime.
