Once again, I'm going to leave names--and places, too--out of this piece. However, I assure you that none of what follows is a figment of my imagination. It represents the findings of some legitimate research efforts from bygone days that I found on the Internet. This first account dates back nearly 25 years.
Believe it or not, officials in one southern state's Parks and Wildlife Department did a study, with an eye toward helping anglers do just that. Their premise was that biologists were going to try and prove what a lot of anglers had suspected for years--that there are smart bass and dumb bass. "We're trying to determine whether the susceptibility to being caught on a rod and reel can be passed from generation to generation," said one official. "Then we can selectively breed for that characteristic and get a fish that's easier to catch."
To that end, researchers started with about 100 one-pound bass, a genetic mix of stocked and native largemouths that probably never had seen a fishing lure. The bass were dumped in a half-acre hatchery pond and left for two months to gather their wits. Then, the biologists pulled out their rods and reels.
"We flailed the water, and there was nowhere for them to hide," said the official. "We know that every single fish had many opportunities to strike a lure. There was a bunch of those fish that, for whatever reason, just said, 'no thank you.' Then, there were others that seemed to be hook-happy." When the scientific anglers landed a fish, they would mark its tail harmlessly with a paper punch and return it to the pond.
After a month of fishing, 40 man-hours total, they drained the pond and inspected the fish. Nearly 25 percent had no holes in their tails at all. Most had one or two holes, and those fish were removed from the experiment. Nine bass had three or four holes (three others had died from overhandling). "Not even the dumbest fish, so to speak, were crawling up on the bank," said the biologist in charge, who went on to explain that the smartest bass and the dumbest ones subsequently were placed in separate ponds.
The following spring, the two groups spawned. A year later, when the offspring had reached 10 to 12 inches, 100 from each group were marked with distinguishing fin clips and dumped into a single pond.
The biologists again reached for their tackle. This second round of fishing seemed to confirm that catchability indeed runs in families. "There was a tendency for offspring of naive parents to also be naive, and a tendency for offspring of wary parents to also be wary," said the biologist in charge. Subsequent work with a third generation also produced similar results.
There's seemingly no record to indicate any pursuit of the next logical step in this research project: to better understand what "dumbness" is. Instead, the biologist in charge admitted that no one really knows what makes a fish strike a lure. "A naive fish, what is that?" he asked. "Is it really a dumb fish? Or, is it an extremely aggressive fish? Maybe it's both. Maybe some are aggressive, just mean as heck and will chase anything that comes near them. Maybe some are hungry all the time and just don't have good sense. I don't know what it is."
Before rods and reels came along, further theorized the biologist in charge, bass probably were best served by a mix of aggressiveness and wariness. "A bolder fish," he offered, "would win the race for a passing minnow but might meet its end in the mouth of an otter, or at the tip of an Indian's spear. But since bass boats and baitcasters have occupied evey available acre of bass habitat, conditions favor the wary fish that sticks to its shadowy world in a bed of water milfoil, or near a flooded stump.
"Whatever the indefinable quality that makes a fish easy to catch," continued the biologist in charge, "it is a valuable trait whenever more anglers are demanding ever more fish to catch. No one has seriously discussed replacing all wild fish with these specially bred ones of ours, but they would provide great sport in state-park fishing ponds, city lakes, and fishing derbies for kids and the handicapped. You want them to catch fish. If we could just put the dumbest fish in the world in there--fish that would strike at any lure you threw in--that would be ideal."
The biologist's study involved a lake that had been stocked with 500 bass. Three or four years later, they opened it to what they called "controlled experimental fishing." All who went in or out had to check with a game warden, and everybody who caught a fish had to fill out a a report, which was monitored. Tallies carefully were kept of all the fish that were caught.
At the end of three years of experimenting, they decided to drain the lake to see how many fish were left. A check of their records beforehand revealed that several hundred fish had been caught the first year, with only about half as many recorded the second year. In the third year, only 40 or so had been caught.
When they drained the lake, they found approximately 1,400 bass, which clearly indicated the fish had reproduced, because they hadn't added any more to the initial stocking of 500. Lots of fish biologists of the era concluded that the few hundred bass that had been caught were the "dummies." The ones that were left to reproduce passed on to their offspring the genetic capabilities they possessed--in this case, wariness, stealth and caution. The 1,400 left in the lake were basically cautious, wary fish.
None of the research findings presented here answers the question I asked at the beginning of this post. However, I think we all can agree it's wonderful to know that fish biologists and researchers today have greatly improved means available to them for conducting their experiments. And, too, here's wishing you Tight Lines! regardless of what the IQ is of the bass you pursue.
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