Ok here's one to ponder...

I read an article in National Geographic a few weeks ago about a study they did on monkeys in regards to fear.

They raised monkeys in captivity, never exposing them to their natural environment. Then they introduced the monkeys to snakes to see if the monkeys were naturally afraid of snakes. The monkeys were completely unafraid of the snakes.

Then they showed monkeys video of real monkeys in the wild acting afraid of snakes. After seeing the video, the captive monkeys then became afraid of snakes.

They did a similar experiment where they showed the monkeys flowers, then showed the monkeys a video where monkeys were acting afraid of flowers (the video was edited). The monkeys didn't become afraid of flowers after seeing the fake video.

So a while back I wrote a piece called learning from fish in a barrel. Here is the link:
http://www.calfishing.com/archives/7_23_2004.htm

Even though monkeys are obviously a lot smarter than fish, I think that the concept is the same. A fish can see something bad happen to another fish and learn from it. So even though the fish isn't smart to begin with when its born, it can become smart due to a predisposition to fear of certain things. Interesting huh.

"Interesting huh."

Yep. I would have disagreed with your hypothesis...until I read your article:-) and now....I d/k...maybe...?

Dan

"Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less"

Deo Vindice

Rob, in the article where you state that our hypothesis or theories or whatever you wanna call them aren't universal, I think that's dead on. If anything in bass fishing was universal, it wouldn't be any fun. :7

I also agree about fish learning by seeing other fish caught on baits and actually being caught themselves. On a couple of smaller lakes I've seen a lure that was just absoltely on fire strike out in the same types of conditions. Now I dunno if that was from fish and their learning capacities or if the conditions just made something a smigen different, but I like to think over time they learn.

But also, how many of their lessons that bass get taught will be forgotten? Does a fish have the brain capacity to remember what he/she/other bass got caught on a year or two ago? "Interesting, huh." Very. :-)

Jake

That is an interesting theory, I agree with it fully. I agree with if you use the same lure over and over again in the same spot on the same fish that eventually they will learn and quit hitting it, but i also feel that they have a very short memory. In many cases I have had similar instances as you had with the trout. Different species of fish though, from trout, bluegill, bass, etc. They will quit hitting if you stay in one spot and fish the same lure they do eventually learn and will quit hitting aggresivly, but I do firmly believe that they have little to no long term memory. Many spots i have fished until they quit biting, you can call it fish being spooked or learning, either way if I leave the spot and come back a couple hours later typically the bite will come back on the same lure that they quit biting before. I have even had fish that I had caught in the two hours prior get caught a second time.
I believe strongly that they do learn, as a survival mechanism, but there long term memory just isn't there.

I'm a little confused why you all seem to be trying to make up your own science when you have a resource like the internet at your fingertips where you can access real science. Do a little searching on websites like http://www.biolbull.org/search.dtl or http://jeb.biologists.org/search.dtl and you can find "real" scientific papers regarding many of the topics you have all mentioned. You have to do a little sifting and parsing to get the information you want, but its usually there.

What's the fun in looking up real science when you can make up your own? :-)

I'm just a slow learner Bob, you have to bear with me.

Sorry, I wasn't trying to be insulting.

Here's a sample from a research paper "Functional Significance of the Co-Localization of Taste Buds and Teeth in the Pharyngeal Jaws of the Largemouth Bass, Micropterus salmoides" from the website http://www.biolbull.org/search.dtl. In this study they fed bass food balls by attaching them to monofilament and moving them around in front of the bass. They used balls with no flavoring and balls with a shrimp flavor. The interesting part to me was that they found that the bass would swallow the flavored balls, but eject the unflavored. The time for ejection was 3 seconds on average. What that translates to for me is that I have about three seconds from the time a bass hits to set the hook. This explains why I seem to hook more biters on plastics than my friends who wait to set the hook.
The point is you have to read the entire paper to dig out the pertinent information. This paper was not about "How to Set The Hook on Largemouth Bass". There are discusions of how Bass feed and what their retention of memory is in many of the papers and once you dig it out and put them together you get the picture. Or you could not bother and just sort of guess.