Bait colour-does it really matter??

[Tee-Cee]

Its a funny old subject this...

I've seen carp turn away(in recent weeks)from bread bait laying in shallow water but had them take the same bait off the surface an hour later.I also caught good fish on red sweetcorn after changing from the yellow stuff.Same with barbel...turn away from a yellow bait over gravel but whack a red bait minutes later...

Now that winter is just around the corner I wondering what colour bait might give me a better chance of catching....(I know smell is also critical if not more so!)....perhaps a dark bait is better in clear coolish water??

Anyway,I'm sure people will have ideas on colour..................??

 

[Scott Whatmore]

I'm not convinced that fish can see in colour. I believe, without any foundation, that their vision is monochrome.

But of course different colours to us would be a different shade to the fish and that may make a difference to their willingness to take a bait.

 

[richiekelly]

Its a funny old subject this...

I've seen carp turn away(in recent weeks)from bread bait laying in shallow water but had them take the same bait off the surface an hour later.I also caught good fish on red sweetcorn after changing from the yellow stuff.Same with barbel...turn away from a yellow bait over gravel but whack a red bait minutes later...

Now that winter is just around the corner I wondering what colour bait might give me a better chance of catching....(I know smell is also critical if not more so!)....perhaps a dark bait is better in clear coolish water??

Anyway,I'm sure people will have ideas on colour..................??

perhaps the carp turned away from the bread on the bottom because it looked bright on the lake bed and took it on the surface because it didnt,i dont like bright baits at any time as i cant think of anything that fish naturaly eat that is a bright colour but then again plenty of fish have been caught on bright baits,i think that its one of those things in fishing that thankfully we will never know the answer to.

 

[chubby48]

bait color

i say yes---------i go to a venue and if u dont av red maggots u wont catch and i tried all the others

 

[Tee-Cee]

Had the same thing when after tench in early winter(sadistic swine!)..its red maggots or nothing!!

 

[Alan Tyler]

Fish have both rods (for monochrome vision) and cones (colour) and very sophisticated colour vision. Rudd, I'm told, actually change one of their visual pigments in the autumn, to tune their vision to water coloured by fallen leaves and dying water-plants.

Funny thing with red maggots nowadays; in the seventies it was bronze-or-blank. What changed?

 

[Jeff Woodhouse]

There was a study in an Abu catalogue back in the 70s that suggested fish see red as a light tone and blue as a dark tone, but what of? Monochrome? - not really sure they do.

I wrote this on baits and flavours and included colour also.

They say dogs see in monochrome yet my dog can pick out a dark yellow from a green ball or light red ball and when photgraphed in monochrome they all look the same. He may, of course be using smell as well - the cheat!

 

[Mark Wintle]

All colours only exist as something created in our (and any other animal) brains through interpretation. This is how some insects see ultra violet etc.

All light is just radiation of a certain wavelength. We can see what we call the visible spectrum but some animals can see outside of our range, and of course with various devices including certain film cameras it is possible to see infra red, ultra violet or even x-rays which are all just more radiation.

Our brains can also adjust colours so that if a room is say very orange our brain puts the equivalent of a blue filter on the colour to tone it down so that if you look at some thing that is outside of the orange lit area at something that is actually white it will look blue.

The short answer is that colour does matter with baits, and I don't understand why red is so popular either compared to bronze/yellow that we all used 30 years ago.

 

[Jeff Woodhouse]

Here's something I didn't know - a completely blind person (my friend being one) can still detect blue light to tell when it's daylight and when it's night.

Work that out!

But blue light is in fact hazardous to your eyes, it can advance Age-related Macular Degeneration so always wear brown lenses when fishing!

 

[peter crabtree]

bronze or blank... I wonder if the rivers had more colour in the 70's and white or bronze maggots were easier for the fish to see?
TBH I don't recall red mag in the sweet shop with the tackle at the back and bait in the same fridge as the ice creams .

 

[Alan Tyler]

I wonder if the modern red dye just tastes nicer than the modern bronze?
Or are they still rhodamine and chrysoidine and let's-pretend-they're-safe-really?

 

[Fred Blake]

It's a funny thing, the red maggot phenomenon. Nowadays almost everyone uses them, and it's rare to see an angler using bronze. When I worked in a tackle shop (twenty five years ago) we sold twenty times as much bronze as red. In fact I think we sold more red pinkies and red squatts than red maggot, and we didn't sell that many of either!

Not long afterwards there was a fad for fluoro pinkies - discos - which didn't last. I think you can still get them, but I haven't bought pinkies for ages.

All this could be put down to fashion, but I think there's more to it than that. I often buy bronze maggots (if I can get them) as they were so effective in the old days. I've not found them to be so recently - they catch fish, but not spectacularly. A switch to reds produces at least as many bites on rivers, and many more on lakes. The shortage of small roach on many rivers may be to blame for bronze maggots not being so deadly, but there are plenty of chub about and they used to scoff bronze ones like they were going out of fashion.

Perhaps they knew something?

 

[Mark Wintle]

I fed reds today on the Stour but bronze was better on the hook; around 90 fish mainly roach plus dace, chublets and perch.

 

[Wobbly Face (As Per Ed)]

I don't think we will ever understand this one.
Having done a lot of trout fishing, colour does matter especially when imitating natural feed. On some days, certain coloured lures will catch. With the maggot job, I found that when fishing the ribble, bronze only worked whilst on stillwaters it was reds. Perhaps the reds looking like bloodworms.
Having done some kick samples, you will be surprised at the colour some of the insects can be. Hence yellow or red and even pink as in some bollies can be a hit.

 

[Tee-Cee]

.........and both served without a hand wash............ugh!!

I know why the bronze had to go but(not being much of a maggot person)did they never come up with a suitable alternative that caught as well as the original-colour wise??

...sorry I think Fred has answered this above....

 

[alan whittington]

Bait colour is important,i believe Fred is correct that fish become to expect red maggots these days,so everything else is unnatural,which as we all know is a no-no,its more important in boilies pastes etc,but only when the bait is possibly not quite up scratch in quality,imo.

 

[quickcedo]

Having spent some years developing my own baits (paste and boilies) I can honestly say that "natural" colours seem to work better. The paste I use at the moment is brown to start with but as it breaks down it takes on a mottled appearance. The bait blends in to the river bed forcing the fish to locate by smell.
The science I must be honest I don't understand but, the bait works. It doesn't work nearly as well when I have dyed it, esp. with bright colours.

 

[jcp01]

I fished the Lower Itchen on Tuesday and was having plenty of fun with the small grayling up to twelve ounces and the occasional small brownie on trotted red maggots, then I switched over to single grains of corn, the catch rate rocketed and the stamp of fish too. Now it was grayling all around the twelve ounces to a pound mark, lots of brown trout, a hooked salmon that just went completely berserk and straightened the size fourteen, and a four pound sea trout that I managed to net after a 'careful' scrap.

This was on the second day of the Lower Itchen Fisheries 'coarse season' so the fish have not seen either maggots or any other coarse bait come to that, since March.

It was a marked change in term of success, but I'm not sure if it was flavour, colour or a combination of both that was doing the trick. Perhaps the chemical dyes that are used to colour maggots have more of an effect than we think they do, I mean just because we can't smell them does not mean a fish cannot as our olfactory systems are so very different and the medium carrying the signals radically so.

I doubt if my nose works underwater...

 

[Fred Blake]

In the old days we used to sprinkle turmeric on bronze maggots for an extra 'edge'. I've tried it on bronze recently and they were no more effective than plain whites. I then tried turmeric on whites and that showed some improvement. Of course, in fishing it's impossible to isolate one variable at a time, so the improved catch rate may have been down to some other factor, such as temperature, light level, presence of otherwise of a pike etc.

Nevertheless, I'm almost certain the bronze dye used today is not as good as chrysodine; the colour is much deeper for a start. I may try to get hold of some annatto and colour my own, if I can only persuade the maggots to go back on the feed for a couple of days.

 

[jef bertels]

Fish must be able to see in colour, or at least in shades - if not, why would they have evolved to change colour at breeding time? Or some species when they're guarding the nest. Our humble stickleback, for example.

Carp anglers' success with washed out baits, made to look like they've been on the lake bed a long time, tells us that the fish can differentiate. On the other extreme, the success of hi-vis plastic sight bobs tipping off a boilie, again points to the colour (or shade) making a big difference.