BASS
BEHAVIOR WITH DR. KEITH JONES
The Lure Test
EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Keith Jones, director of fish
research for the Pure Fishing Laboratory in Spirit Lake,
Iowa, has been studying bass for over 16 years. He’s
an expert in the field of bass behavior. Jones’
scientific research involves finding out what factors
will make bass attack lures and baits.
“We
bought 50 naïve bass and divided them into 10 groups
of five,” Jones explains. “We placed the
first group of five bass in the tank, attached a camera
to the robot to see how the bass approached the lure,
put a crankbait on our robot and ran the crankbait in
the water around the tank for five laps. We counted
the number of strikes and did 10 repetitions of the
same test, using five new bass for each repetition.”
Jones learned that during the first lap around the pool,
the bass went nuts, and all five bass attempted to eat
the lure. Some of the bass struck the lure repeatedly.
The lure received an average number of 12 strikes. The
second time the lure went around the tank, the average
number of strikes dropped from 12 to eight. As the lure
continued around the tank, the number of strikes dropped
drastically. Each group of bass averaged about 25 strikes,
or about five strikes per bass. Jones found the hooks
on the lure so bent that they couldn’t hook the
bass. The next part of the test determined how long
the bass could remember their encounters with that same
lure. Jones and his team put that same group of 50 bass
aside for two weeks, let them rest, continued feeding
them pellet food and didn’t expose them to any
lures.
“After
two weeks of resting and eating nothing but pellet food,
we took half the group, 25 bass, put them back into
the test tank, got them accustomed to the tank and then
repeated the same test with the same lure,” Jones
reports. “Then we put the bass in the tank in
groups of five fish at a time to repeat the experiment.
We measured the average number of strikes on that lure
when it went around the tank five times. Remember that
during the first test, the bass averaged 25 strikes
on the lure for the five times it went around the tank.
On the second test, each group of bass averaged attacking
that same lure only twice. We realized that the bass
had remembered that the lure wasn’t food, even
though 14 days had passed between the two experiments.
We decided that two weeks wasn’t long enough for
the bass to forget about the first test.
“The
25 bass that weren’t tested after the first two
weeks of seclusion remained isolated and were fed only
pellet food for three more months. After three months
and two weeks, the remaining 25 bass were divided into
five groups and then were retested using the same lure.
We wanted to learn if after three months the bass had
forgotten about the lure they tried to eat that didn’t
provide them any nourishment. The group that had been
held for three months and two weeks showed a better
strike response than the bass that hadn’t seen
the lure for only two weeks. However, the strike response
from each group of bass averaged only five strikes after
the lure had gone around the tank five times, whereas
during the first test the bass attacked the lure 25
times. We concluded that even though these bass had
been held for three months and two weeks, they still
remembered their encounters with that lure.”
TOMORROW: THE LURE TEST CONTINUED
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