Well think about it, any fish or crustacean that is alive and kicking is going to smell one way. Any fish or crustacean that is dead is going to smell another way.

The next question is, do bass eat dead food? I think they do sometimes, but I don't think dead food is very commonly found. What I mean is ... the minute something in a lake starts dying - it gets eaten. A dead fish will float to the top or sink to the bottom. A dead crawdad will sink to the bottom. Things floating or laying still on the bottom stand out in an environment where everything alive is moving around. If there is a bass anywhere nearby, it's going to eat whatever it is that's dying before it's dead.

If a bass doesn't get it, something else probably will. And I really think that once something starts to rot, predators will not eat it any more. Vultures will pick at a dead fish that is rotting but I've seen rotten bluegill floating in lakes and they were left alone. I'm confident bass saw those bluegills, came up and looked/smelled them and decided to pass. It's probably instinctual for animals to avoid eating rotten food items unless they are equipped to (like vultures).

So does using scent that smells like dead fish or dead crawdad make sense? Is there a level of rottenness that is reached where the scent becomes a turn off? I don't know. And if you're going to try to bottle a fresh scent, how do you keep it fresh without refrigeration? I've never seen a refrigerated scent. Do scent mfgrs put preservatives in their scent? I'd imagine that they do. Do those preservatives affect the scent negatively?

As long as we're on the topic, does using scent that smells like anise or garlic or banana make any sense? Sure as hell doesn't make any sense to me. Bass don't eat fruits and vegetables last time I checked. It may smell pungent to us, but do bass care? Would a lion that ate only meat have any interest in a piece garlic just because it smelled strongly? I doubt it. This kind of thing seems purely psychological to me.

These days I put megastrike on my baits for lubrication purposes. It doesn't give off any strong smell and I figure that's ok. If it smells passingly like some fish product, that's enough for me. I'll spray bang on baits for a similar reason, it lubricates and it doesn't smell out of the ordinary. I've sniffed a few crawdads in my day and never noticed that they give off a particular smell other than moss or mud smell. They certainly don't smell like garlic!

I also believe in the power of salt. Fish have a certain amount of salt in their bodies, I'm sure most living creatures do and I think that predators react favorably to salt. Ever notice that a cat or dog will lick your arm if you've been sweating? Deer like salt to, hence salt licks are used to attract them. If a bass bites a plastic lure and tastes salt, that's a plus in my book.

Here's an interesting observation. Friend of mine had a tank with a bass in it. The bass was about 12 inches. There were a few giant crawdads in the tank that were probably 6 or 7" total length. The bass never messed with those crawdads until they molted. As soon as they started to molt, the bass would attack them and get them in it's mouth. He'd swim around for hours with the crawdad in his mouth even though it was too big to eat. Something in the molting of the crawdad triggered that bass. It instincutally knew that the crawdad was vulnerable. Who knows if it was a smell or a what. Maybe the bass could visually identify the change in color in the crawdad as it molted. Who knows. But that bass killed all the big crawdads one at a time when they molted. Put the smell of a molting crawdad in a bottle, I'll buy it.