Why Does the Coike Catch Big Bass? Fisheries Biologist Weighs In...

Ever wondered why a bait that looks like a sea urchin is catching giant bass across the country? In this episode of the Serious Angler Podcast, we sit down with a professional fisheries biologist to break down the exact science and biology behind the Hideup Coike style bait. We dive deep into what a largemouth and smallmouth bass actually think this spiky, unique JDM lure is, and why it triggers such aggressive feeding responses from mature, pressured fish.

📌 Important Links:
Steve's Article: https://txprolake.substack.com/p/the-fuzzy-dice-mystery-are-we-matching?r=1dxrqq&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=post-publish&triedRedirect=true

📌 Baits Discussed (Click the link and use code SERIOUS10 for 10% off your order):
Hideup Coike: https://omnia.direct/hideup

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📌 Click here to start your FREE trial of Omnia Fishing Premium PRO: https://omnia.direct/SAPremiumPRO

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:20

I'm all right. Welcome everyone to the Serious Anger Podcast, where as always, our main course for you will be talking and hopefully teaching you more about bass fishing, and especially here on our real biology segment. We're joined by the man, Mr. Steven Barden. As always, I'm your host, Bailey Igra. Steve, spend a minute, man. How you doing?

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Good, brother. How about yourself?

SPEAKER_00 0:42

No complaints here because open water. It was actually 70 degrees the other day, and then it's back down to snowing today, but we at least have open water and the bass are biting, so I I can't complain.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

It's always unbelievable every time I hear this, because the spawn is over here.

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Yeah, we're not even close, dude. We were at 39 degree water the other day, so it's we're not even I say over.

SPEAKER_01 1:06

The spawn is 35% done. Nah, it's it's 50% done. I don't know. It's it's so weird because we have we had 45 degrees air temp overnight last night. We're recording this first week of April. So truthfully, the spawn's halfway done here in Texas. All the big fish have spawned, all the main West Texas lakes, um, East Texas stuff is is kind of still producing, you know. For us, we talk about the spawn like it's uh universal thing that happens over one week or one month or whatever, but it takes a long time. Um and it's throughout the lake, you know, so it starts in the northeast of the lake and it works kind of southwest at the dam. And so we're we're to that point where at least mid-lake, if not bottom of the lake.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

I got you. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of how our glacial lakes work too. It'll start one week in the north, north end of it, and then within the month, like two or three weeks later, the south will then will finally go.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Yeah, and I find that you know, we have uh we have Florida bass, and then of course, largemouth bass. Technically, we have smallmouth and spots and guadalupe, we have all that. But right, you know, for for Maine, like let's say Lake Fork, well, you have northern bass, and you have Florida bass, then you have what we call like an integrate, and they all spawn a little bit different. You know, the Floridas seem to start earlier, but will give up during a cold front, and uh largemouth bass seem to spawn just slightly later, and they'll stick it out.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

Yeah, it's I always find it interesting of especially in the north here with our smallmouth and largemouth on when they go, where they go, how they you know will operate and all that stuff, because it's for the most part totally different, especially when you talk about uh you know, smallmouth. Obviously, well, if they have the light and the water clarity, they'll go much deeper. Um, but of course one thing that's been cool with you know the combination of forward facing, but also like an aqua view, that's been a really cool tool for me to learn is just how deep some of the largemouth will spawn too. And I've seen some of the guys, you know, shout out to our uh our buddies over at at UCall, a bunch of West Texas um you know, hammers guides out of that way that find some of those big largemouth spawning deep. Um, it's cool to see just how deep they will spawn, and it kind of changes your perspective and all things. And then when you line up the timing windows and stuff like that, it's it's really cool. Really cool to see just uh how much we really didn't know.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

It's not that we didn't know it. I mean, I can remember my dad telling me, you know, in the early 90s about bass spawning in the tops of treetops, right? You know, like out at Fort, like not on the shoreline, they're on the tops, like in the in the crevices of the submerged trees. And like anglers know these things, like, yes, forward-facing sonar is showing us, but these are things that like the old school know your water body anglers, they already knew. Yeah, they knew it, they've known it for years. There's always been a population of fish that spawn deep. There's always been a population of fish that spawn early. Those fish um are taking advantage of the environment, right? Like uh, I know we're gonna cover it today, but I wrote this really cool article, and in this article, I work through the spawn and and what's happening. And one of the things I didn't talk about in the article, but should be fairly obvious, is I I I talked about the spawn is happening in the littoral zone. Littoral zone is a scientific term for basically the part of the water body where sunlight will penetrate to the bottom and plants will grow. I used that term to loosely describe where reproduction will happen as well, where spawning can occur. Spawning can occur where sunlight can hit the bottom and warm the bottom and warm the eggs. Um I think that I think that we don't like I listened to Bass After Dark from last week, and they were discussing weather patterns and how weather affects fish. And they all agreed that like temperature is the number one weather part of weather that impacts fish, and it's really the temperature of land and air and atmosphere, how it warms the water, and that's a delayed process, but then it warms the water, and then the water warmth is what actually impacts the fish, and that that drives the spawn that we're talking about right now. But one thing we don't really um give enough credit to is the fact that that temperature is driven by the color and clarity of the water as well. Like it's not just atmosphere. If you have warmer water, it may be because you have turbidity or something in the water that will absorb that warmth. Or if your fish are spawning deeper, it may be because you have clarity that allows sunlight and warmth to penetrate further into the lake. Like it is it's so complex.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

Yeah, I love that though. It's that spot that's cool, and then like I'm trying to remember who it was that mentioned on our show of like we think about bass and just fish in general too much from our perspective, meaning above the water, looking down at it versus thinking about it from the bass and fish perspective under the water looking up.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

Yeah, it might have been Gary. It was Gary, is episode one, Gary Klein. That's he always talks about that. Um, but you know, that's gosh Bailey, that's the hard and and challenging part of fishing. Like we want a single answer for everything. When you take when you take multiple species and crosses of those species, and you put them in all the types of environments from creeks to rivers, which is where 90% of our bass species evolved, and then you put them into lakes and reservoirs, and you divide those out from natural lakes to glacier lakes, um reservoirs that are man-made impoundments, and then you you kind of then throw in tidal, depending on if they're coastal, like you take all those things and you say, now tell me about the spawn. And you're like, Okay, cool. Let's spread that over the entire country, too. We started this conversation with the fact that it's snowing in Buffalo, and the fact that it's you know 80 degrees in Texas. Yeah. Tell me about the spawn.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

And you got, yeah, the diversity of fisheries, and then you got the, and I mean, I know people that follow the wave of spawn from Florida all the way up to the northeast. Just because that's just what they enjoy doing. But it's like it's to your point, it's such a wild card, depending on size of fishery, clarity of fishery, weather throws a wrench in there.

SPEAKER_01 8:32

The only thing I can tell you about the spawn definitively, like as a one, like this one piece of information is universal. Because if you tie on a wait list Inco, you go catch them during the spawn. You're gonna catch them. That's it. That's the one universal. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:51

Everything else, it depends. That's the dang truth. It was fun watching uh speaking to Texas and Spawn was some of the VPT guys. They were on OHIV, and was it uh Brownwood? Is that what it's called? Uh yeah, Brownwood.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

That's uh one of the three lakes that I consider my home home bodies of water, brownwood. Um watch spawning. I mean, this is not part of our pregame plan, but if if we can just deviate from the plan for a second. Yeah. Um there's this there's a town called Early, Early, Texas. And uh the city of Early about five years ago started working with Texas Parks and Wildlife, and it was being led by Michael Homer, who's been on our show as a guest. They started working on a on a project called the Town Lake Project. It's a little started out as a little farm pond. They talked to Michael Homer and like, what can we do with this to attract businesses and anglers and people to the park? And they turned this little one-acre pond into a seven-acre lake. And Texas Parks and Wildlife put it into the uh the program that they they uh call the neighborhood fishing program, which means they're gonna stock it with channel cat and rainbow trout as put and take fishery throughout the year. Um, Michael's team also stocked the lake with bluegill sunfish, red ear sunfish, kind of built a food chain. They installed aeration, they installed uh like ADA uh accessible uh docks and kayak launches, and even a place to like literally pull your kayak up onto a dock to where you can get in and out of it, you know, if you're mobily impaired in some way. They've done everything. Well, then a like three years ago, um they asked me to help on the project. And so what I was doing was we were bringing in some fish, some coal fish from my clients' lakes, like some bass to stock the lake with bass uh that were advanced size. We stocked it with third fin shad, and then we did a lot of work to control algae and plankton and all that kind of stuff, boring stuff, right? But we made this seven-acre lake to where people could catch fish in the middle of early. Um the early city, uh, like all the administrators, the the works development, like they built this boardwalk, they're attracting hotels. So, through this process, we started talking about major league fishing. And they really wanted to brand the city of Early as a fishing community. You know, they just built a park, they invested millions of dollars into this project. I don't, you know, I don't know what what the total number is, but they've invested years of work. And uh we started talking to them, and I introduced them to Major League Fishing, and we did a team series. We did a team series where they fished OH IV, which is about 60 miles away from early. They would home base in early, they would drive. For for those of you that don't know, the team series for major league fishing. Uh, the Anglers still don't know. It's like the historic cups, like they still don't know where they're gonna go. And the only rule for us whenever we're doing site selection is every body of water has to be within an hour of that town. So from early, there's OHIV, there's Lake Coleman, there's uh Brady, there's Brownwood, there's Proctor, and there's Lake Leon. So there's a ton of choices within an hour drive. Uh so we selected OHIV first, Anglers went and fished there. OHIV, this was in the fall of 2024. It's tough fishing. OHIV is always tough in the fall. Um tough fishing, but but it was still good. It was still great TV. They then moved to Brownwood. Brownwood was outstanding. They used it for the knockout round and then the championship round. They they moved to Brady, and that was a pretty tough fishery as well. Uh, so immediately afterwards, the city of Early was like, what can we do that's bigger? Like the team series was amazing, let's do more. So they started planning this BPT event, and uh the schedule just worked out where it's gonna be the last week of March, you know, and we're thinking, man, that that could be right in the heart of the spawn. Um and so they fished the first two days, 50 anglers, 51 anglers on OHIV. And we did OHIV. Um, it's hard to fish the spawn at OHIV because it's it's a reservoir built on the Colorado River, basically. And so it's West Texas, it it fluctuates like 30 vertical feet depending on rainfall and and how the river acts. And right now it's it's low a little bit, like 30% low. So it is more acting more like the river, but it's acting like a river that has um half a mile of what is called salt cedar, which is kind of like a mesquite tree that's growing whenever the lake was down, so it's now flooded up salt cedar. So you can't navigate your boat to the shoreline. Like what you want to do, you know, during the spawn, you know, you want to put your boat in eight, eight feet of water and have the shoreline a casting distance away and just run the shoreline and find those spawning fish and visually see them. And that's very tough to do at OHIV. Uh so what you're saying, like, yes, we saw this grind, we saw a couple of guys really get into those salt seeders and catch some fish, but the best fish catches I saw from OHIB were on topwater baits. Um, because you would see, like um, I think a lot of those fish were already post-spawn and they were fry guarding. Uh, you did see a little bit of a shad spawn, and just all those things combined allowed for some cool afternoon topwater catches where you, you know, we'd see fish schooling up and we'd see an angler pop into a place. I think of Jacob Wheeler doing that a little bit. And uh, you know, they might they might make their day in 10 minutes, you know. That's that's fun to watch on the BBT. Then they switched to Brownwood. And I haven't finished the data set, but the first day at Brownwood, if you haven't watched that, was one of the most epic days you could imagine. Um, Brownwood outpaced OH Ivy and big fish. I'm talking fish over five pounds, outpass outpaced OH Ivy. And it probably, when I look at it, Brownwood was on par with Santi Cooper for that day. Wow. I mean, it it it really showed out. Uh you know, Santi Cooper and Fork, historically, when I go back and look at data, like they have the best days. The best days, what I mean is the most fish over five pounds. Those two places consistently, if BPT goes there, I know we're gonna get a lot of plus five pound fish per day. And Brownwood outpaced them for one day. That's the last day, the championship day. Um yeah. So we were so the first day on Brownwood was was pre frontal, like the front was moving in, the fish were the fish were feeding. The next day, it was tough. Um, and that's what's hard about a small impoundment. So Brownwood's only 7,500 acres. And whenever it shut off, the whole lake shut off. I mean, it was it was a grind uh to fish lake. Now we still had some good fish, but you know, it this is the cool part about like it being a home lake, is I've experienced those amazing days, and I've experienced those terrible days, you know, where you catch two or three fish, you're like, do I even know what I'm doing out here? And then to watch to watch the BPT guys go out and have the same experience, I'm like, all right, I'm I'm okay.

SPEAKER_00 17:20

Yeah, we thought for sure, like watching the last day, uh, just with how Lucas has been had been catching him pretty good, especially in the afternoon, and not using his scope period yet, where like you know, Wheeler had gone through his, and that usually it's when it so somewhat falls off a little bit. We're like, Oh, Lucas has got this in the bag and zero in the last period, which was a shocker, but like to the conditions though, it kind of makes sense. Yeah, I mean it wasn't easy on anybody.

SPEAKER_01 17:47

I mean, this is the hard part is you know, you can never predict these things and you can't control anything. Right. I wish that I could have seen Brownwood on that knockout day and the weights carry over to championship day because I think Lucas could have probably put up 150 pounds in knockout round. And I mean, because he was on a pattern and he left fish to just go. I mean, he tied on the coal shad, he went and just, I'm gonna say he went and just explored the lake. Yeah, you know, and let's just if I get a big bite, whatever. But everywhere he went on knockout round, he was catching fish all day long. And he could have probably set several BPT records on that day. And you know, the right the the reason he didn't is because you know there's no prize for winning knockout round, right? You know, it doesn't matter. So once he's secure, like let's just go figure out what am I gonna do for day two, championship day. That's what he did. I would do the same thing, but I wish we would have had the opportunity to see it for what it could have been.

SPEAKER_00 19:07

Yeah, absolutely. He could do no wrong in the knockout round, that knockout round, that's for that's for danger.

SPEAKER_01 19:13

Yeah, so that was fun for me personally. It's it intrigues me whenever it's a home lake, how much more attention I pay to it. Um, and I watched, you know, they they fished Whitney and Waco earlier in the month. I watched those a little bit. We do a lot of work on Waco. Um, I don't fish it very often. I actually didn't expect it to fish as well as it did. I was very happy with that event. But Brownwood, um I would say it's it's one of those fisheries. Like, if uh if you came to town, no matter what time of the year, we can go catch fish on Brownwood. Um, there's a lot of the times where just midday, July and August, you can find two to three pound largemouth schooling shad in 40 feet of water on the surface. Wow. Uh like they're white bass. It's it's a really phenomenal fishery. That's cool. Kind of like almost herring-like then. Almost, yes. Yeah, because it's got a lot of gizzard shad in. And uh it it fishes fun. It fishes very fun. Yeah, that's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Well, dude, uh, for the folks, this show, obviously, they can see by title and thumbnail, we're gonna get kind of get into the hottest bait in bass fishing right now and kind of get your two cents as a fisheries biologist versus just us as the angler and our our theory of why we think they eat it. But uh, we do have some other Q ⁇ A's too after the fact that we're gonna we're gonna get into as well. But um I think we dive right into it, man, and kind of I would love to get your perspective as a fisheries biologist, the short and quick of it, which we're gonna dive into, you know, the the extent of the the article that uh you talked about at length on this, which we'll link in the bio for people if they want to go and read it. Um, but I just want the quick well quick hitter. Why do you think these bass are eating these koiky urchin style baits?

SPEAKER_01 21:13

Well, I think that's two different questions. Um I wrote an article about these urchin-style baits and if they mimic plankton, because that's a question that I've actually been asked. First, Iconelli asked me this question a couple of years ago, like two years ago. And at that time, we didn't really have urchin baits here in the US. We only had fuzzy dice, right? And there's a there's a big distinction between those two because fuzzy dice are uh a square or round piece of plastic with basically silicone strands driven through them in in multi-direction. And they act in the water a little different than these urchin baits do. These urchin baits um are are made of a different type of plastic. They're they're all every appendage is is made of that same type of plastic. So they move through the water and and and how they are in the water column act a little different, right? But I at the time, like I answered the question of yeah, okay, that that might. Be true. Like, sure, there are types of phytoplankton and types of zooplankton that kind of look like the fuzzy dice. So, sure, that sounds like a good theory to me. And then later, Tyler Anderson, who's got a YouTube channel, Tyler's Real Fishing, he texted me. And I think he was out on the water filming, you know, a pond episode or a kayak episode or whatever. And he was he was catching fish on it, and he asked that same question. Um, so with that, I finally was like, fine, let's take some pictures of some plankton and see if if we can find something that looks real. So that's what we did. I had my team run some water samples whenever we would throw a plankton at, like, let's see if if they look like plankton. And then I uh I got a couple images just drafted up. You know, you may have them here, or um, you know, you can definitely read the article to see them of what like the there's so many different species of phytoplankton. So you can't really take it down to a species level. You have to look at like class or order, like if we're trying to talk about animal kingdom. Uh, but there's some generics of what these fish eat and when they eat them. And as you as you go through the article, you have to, like, in my mind, how I thought about it, you have to like get yourself prepared for the fact that at some point in a fish's life, every fish, they eat plankton. There's two real types of plankton, like you can divide them out. There's animal plankton, we call that phytoplankton. Those types of plankton, they create their own energy just like any plant by absorbing sunlight. Uh, they have chlorophyll in their cells and they make their own energy. And I'm talking in generalities, like there are some phytoplankton that's not exactly true, but phytoplankton is plant plankton. Then zooplankton is what we would call anoplankton. Like, if you go back to biology 101 in high school, you learned phytoplankton, zooplankton. Zooplankton are mostly mobile, so they can move, and they hunt other planktons because of that, they have appendages, right? They have something that helps them move. And phytoplankton um are not mobile for the most part, so they just rise and fall based on gas that's within their cells, and they rise throughout the day as sunlight gets overhead, and so phy zooplankton chase phytoplankton, so they go up and down as well to eat these phytoplankton. When a bass is born, it learns to hunt initially. You'll see in the article, a bass is born with no mouth, it grows a mouth like after two or three days. Finally, it swims up out of the bottom of the of the nest. It now becomes free swimming in the water column. The first things it hunts are zooplankton, microscopic little zooplankton. And for the most part, they're clear or kind of yellowish in color. Um, but they can have some green to them depending on they're they're almost translucent, right? So if they've been eating a lot of plankton, they have a green color to them, and then they'll have these little appendages depending on the species um that may mimic what you what you're seeing from like an urchin. Whenever, whenever I looked at, okay, well, what what are they most likely eating in those first couple days? And they only do this for like two or three weeks before they can now they've grown up and now they're eating insects. Well, first insect larva, then then actual aquatic insects, and then within, I mean, depending on where you are in the country and your water temperature, within one month to three months, they they are of size to start eating other fish. And they spend basically that first year, you may even say two years of their life eating insects, insect larvae, small crustaceans, small fish. So if we take this theory that urchin baits mimic zooplankton, then that means that a fish learns how to hunt zooplankton in the first month of its life, two to three weeks, and never forgets that. And it's hardwired into their brain. Now, what Iconelli said is, Stephen, you gotta imagine you're a fish and you're swimming in the lake, and all of a sudden you see the biggest plankton you've ever seen in your life, and you go, I remember eating that, it's delicious, and you eat it. Okay, you know, I they don't have rational thought like that, but uh that is fun to think, right? Right. So if that's true, then you kind of gotta think about like, okay, these baits, you fish them high in the water column. That mimics a zooplankton. Um you fish, I mean, we all color of of baits, we all have our preferences, but you fish white, clear, or some sort of green, green pumpkin, something like that. So that kind of fits, right? Kind of fits. Um, so then I I wanted to look at, well, is there any that that absolutely mimic one uh like the urchin bait? And I found an example of one uh that I think is like spot on. Like it is it is absolutely it now. That specific one is a is a predatory zooplankton that's fairly large in size, still microscopic, but um it actually eats other zooplankton, and it's it's not covered in like soft tentacles, it's covered in basically spines, and it it injects other zooplankton to to consume them. So I don't know that that would be a great food item, uh, but it does exist, and you know you can definitely see it. But kind of the last part of this, Bailey, is uh I I looked at the all the zooplankton that exists that like were the examples I was using, and there are some of them that do look like creature baits. Like if you think of your old brush hog, um if you even think of just like a standard tube, um like basically any of the creature baits, you're gonna find zooplankton that look almost identical. And so that kind of I I end the article with kind of just a rundown of if that is true, if they are mimicking zooplankton, then there is a world where an angler could fish a lot of creature baits high in the water column, weightless, and truly mimic the appearance of zooplankton as a larger size. And if we get the same style urchin reaction to that bait, um, you're kind of on to the next big trend of like, yeah, let's mimic zooplankton, which is kind of cool because we already have hundreds of examples of of those baits. There's no, I I try to think of a great way to test this. And the hard part is you would need a control group that's never seen a zooplankton, which means the days that it starts its swim up, you would have to feed it something that's not zooplankton because it's gonna starve almost immediately if it doesn't eat. Right. And I I can't work my way around that, like a prepared food that you could do. Like maybe we could talk to Josh Sackmar at Red Hills and say, like, can you do this? But he's gonna lose a lot of fish trying to get a couple that have never seen a plankton before. Because then we would have to then compare once we get them to an adult size, will they eat an urchin? If they will still eat an urchin, then theory is blown. Bass will eat anything. Right now, you could if you now you asked, sorry, long-winded answer to your question. Um, you did ask what I think. The article's not written from necessarily my perspective of what I think. The article's just written as more like let's explore this idea that another may have about the zooplankton. But what do I think? I think that just like um just like uh a hair jig, just like a like do you remember Mop Jig? Have you ever fixed a mop jig? Yeah, like some of those baits on lighter weight as they fall through the water column, they're flaring out. Um, I think that that could represent even like a fry school. Um, you know, I don't think we take into account the fact that a lot of times bass don't care what they eat as long as they can catch it easily. And yes, like visually, I think that even the urchin, as it moves through the water, like each one of those appendages is kind of moving separately. And and if you zoom out and distort it through water column, does it does it not look like a school of fry, maybe? Does it not look like a bunch of smaller things moving together? I don't know. Um, that would be probably my closer theory. I mean, there's nothing really in nature in the freshwater environment that looks exactly like the urchin at that size.

unknown 32:43

Right.

SPEAKER_01 32:43

So those are those are kind of the two perspectives I have of what they, if they were thinking rationally, what they would be thinking they're eating. In reality, I think they just eat anything that's in their environment. And as long as they don't have a negative experience, they continue to eat it. And we may be very this just like the the dice baits, I feel like kind of went quickly through the market. Yeah, you might see the urchin baits do the same thing. If the reality is not that they have something ingrained in their brain, that this is this other thing I've eaten in the past with a positive response, then fishing is always a negative response to eating something. Getting hooked and removed from the water is a reaction that provides a negative feedback. So the fish is not easily going to fall for that same trick multiple times. Every time they fall for it and that negative reaction happens, eventually they teach themselves not to do it.

SPEAKER_00 33:51

Does that make sense? Absolutely. Yeah. So that kind of falls in line with the one other one that I've been hearing, is just that bass are curious and they don't have hands.

SPEAKER_01 34:00

So that's fall in line with easy meal. If Gary Klem is on, that's exactly what he says. Um, he he talks about it all the time. Bass don't have hands. The only way that they can test what is in their environment is to open their mouth, put it in their mouth. They feel it, they decide are they gonna swallow it or not. Because just because a bass bites something doesn't mean it's actually gonna eat it. Right. You've seen them mouth things before and then immediately spit them out. I mean, you've seen them pick gravel up and do the same thing. Like they I've seen little sticks in their stomach, like they will just pick things up constantly. Uh you know, that's that would not surprise me at all. But the feedback loop, every time that fish is hooked and removed from the water, like it gets that negative feedback, we would if there is nothing that's that's telling them this is a good thing to eat, then that trend is gonna burn through the industry really quick because on pressured fisheries, we're gonna use that bait until it becomes useless, and then they'll quit biting it once you've reached a saturation in the population. Now, the good thing is we don't know or we don't currently think that they can teach each other these things. But um there is a little bit of research that says there there are some feedbacks that can be shared in the environment. So, like if you have a school of fish and uh and one of those fish is has enough negative feedback to abate and does a stress hormone and does a negative reaction, like do the others pick up from that and go, no, I don't want to eat that. Like, there's there is some research that shows that that might be possible. Um, but it's still it's you know not necessarily enough uh for us to say that bass can't do that all the time.

SPEAKER_00 36:05

Right. So like similar when you're saying when you're talking about like the stress hormone, one of the things that I remember because I was always an addict of shark week, whenever that was on the whether whether it was discovery or animal plan, I can't recall, but um, they would say like if there was a dead shark in the area that like sharks could pick up on that, and that was kind of like their stay away. Is that a similar deal? Like when they have that stress hormone that you know stay away.

SPEAKER_01 36:31

Fish are constantly testing their environment. Um if you watch Bass After Dark this last week, then uh Mark Sexton was on. Um, Mark Sexton, um, you know, from Berkeley Labs, you know him personally. A great scientist, and uh he worked uh under Dr. Keith Jones, and um you know Dr. Keith Jones is famous for the book uh Knowing Bass, and that's what they have tested and worked on for both of their entire careers is basically bass constantly tests the environment, they know what's in the environment, something changes, they react to it, they go to it, they go away from it, those kind of things. Um, I'm not I'm not familiar enough with any research to say like this hormone is produced by a bass, and therefore they can pick up and they can pick up from it from this far away. Like, I I don't know any of that. I know that we have observed trends in populations of fish where they will learn lures, and there's a difference between how largemouth and Florida bass and smallmouth all learn that the rate, the rate at which they uptake that information. Um, there is some science that leads us to think that that is um taught in community. And they, if there is a single change in the environment that they can test and read, they are doing that instantaneously through sight, smell, sound, inputs into the latter line. Uh they they live in this environment and they know what's happening in it. And they're taking social cues from other fish. They have to be. So if you have a fish that becomes distressed or even just shies away from a bait, you're gonna have other fish that follow that movement in the same way that let's say you have an urchin bait and you have a school of fish around you. If one fish makes an approach to that bait, how many other fish are gonna make that same approach? And they're gonna do it almost in an instant. And then if that one fish eats it and starts swimming to your boat, how many other fish are following that fish to your boat? Yeah, because of the cues that they're seeing, uh, that's that is just how fish work in the environment. That's awesome. So the article doesn't cover all that, but the article, if you're interested, if you want to learn about the spawn, if you want to learn about the first month of a fish's life, what it's eating, and kind of this idea that maybe a bass is consuming these baits because they're zooplankton, they have this learned thought of I consume these these high appendaged individuals. Um I think it's worth a read. It was fun to put together just because it's so different from from the stuff we look at normally. So it's it's on our sub stack. Uh, I'm sure you got the link. It's in the description. Enjoy away.

SPEAKER_00 39:55

Have you thrown the koiki yet? Have you thrown these urgents?

SPEAKER_01 39:58

I haven't. I haven't. Um I I like, I mean, I haven't got to fish that much this year. Um, so I haven't even I haven't even got an opportunity to purchase one. Um, and of course nobody's just mailed them to my house. Um but this time of year I love to throw imitation bass lures, right? Like a lure that looks like um you know a three to eight inch bass, because I know this is the time of year whenever most English don't throw bass lures, bass pattern at all. Um, but this is the time of year when another bass can literally ruin your nest uh or could eat all of your fry. And if you're a bigger female, big females after spawn are gorging themselves on really whatever they can catch, large sunfish, big shad, um, and bass. And so I this is the time of year where I don't really fish. Um, like I don't do much bed fishing. So I for what we do, like we catch a lot of bug bass and stuff like that, just because we're harvesting a lot of fish, and I haven't got to play with the with the urchin yet. What about you?

SPEAKER_00 41:21

Yeah, I've been throwing it for a year now. It's um because I I I have said it on the show before, but I've adapted this rule a couple of years ago where um if I see something in it, I'm like, that's stupid. No one's no bass is gonna eat that, that sort of thing. I need to go buy a few of them because likely chances are it's happened several times now. Ah, it's stupid, I'm not gonna buy that. And a year later, it's the biggest thing in bass fishing.

SPEAKER_01 41:50

I said at the beginning of the episode, the Cinco. Mm-hmm. What in the environment looks like a Cinko?

SPEAKER_00 41:57

Besides a worm, that's that's it.

SPEAKER_01 42:00

Even then, how many worms do you think, you know, how many worms do you think bass are just eating on a regular basis?

SPEAKER_00 42:07

I had no clue, to be honest. It's just what you it's what the the stereotypical thing you're taught growing up as uh early on in bass fishing is oh put a worm on a bobber.

SPEAKER_01 42:18

Yeah, well, yeah, I do a lot of stomach content analysis and I've never seen a worm. Now, they are very soft and would be digested quickly, so I'm not gonna say it doesn't happen, but I've seen insect larvae, I've seen insects, I've seen frogs, I've seen mice, I've seen ducks, I've seen thousands of different types of fish, crayfish. I've never seen a worm. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_00 42:47

That's actually pretty cool. That's a sound bite in itself. Um dude, that's awesome. Um, if people want more of it, I'm we're actually putting together a panel show on actually the fishing of the of the koiki, like rigging, all that stuff. We'll have that out here soon. But um, Steve, on the QA stuff, I want to kick it over to that because that was on some stuff at length in the Koiky. And if you guys have additional questions, of course, just like the show, we'll submit them and we'll bring them up on the next QA or lake hotline. But um, this show is essentially one big lake hotline for you guys because we've had a bunch of people asking about the koiki, and I've been asking Steve about the koiki, and it sounds like a bunch of other folks have been asking you about the koiki. But um, I'm gonna kick it up. I have a question for you selfishly because it's something that I have seen and I want to understand it a little bit better, is um flooding flooding water. Um like lakes that that rise from extreme rain and things like that. Now, we've always heard, you know, and I see it more talked around you know the summertime or spawn and into post-spawn of you know, when the lake levels go up, the fish crash the bank. Um, you know, that sort of deal. I always thought there was a threshold of water temperature when it was super cold that it didn't really matter. But I noticed something recently that was really interesting to me is I went to a fishery when I had gotten home and the lakes just opened up in New York. It was 36 degree water. So, of course, they're in their wintering holes, they're super deep, things like that. About five, six days later, we get crazy rain here in New York. New York. Like lakes are up a couple feet. They're way beyond the banks. Um, you know, roads are getting swept away, like that crazy torrential rain. Water temperatures did not change. It maybe it went up a degree and went out to the same fishery. All the winning holes are empty and they are on the bank as tight as they can be, less than five feet of water. Right. I wanna I'm curious from your perspective, how do these fish know that the water levels are rising and what is what instills in them to go and crash the bank?

SPEAKER_01 44:55

Okay. Yeah, um man, we should call this show it depends. I'm gonna take your situation. I'm gonna take your situation first. And your water temperature is 38 degrees. The rain that's coming in, in my mind, was warmer. Correct. Right? Like it's not sleet, it's not snow. You're you know, what was the what was the temperature outside at that time that it was raining?

SPEAKER_00 45:27

The the time during the rain, it was warm. Like some of the creek mouths where water was coming in was 42, 43, but you'd back off 50 foot. It was back in the 30s.

SPEAKER_01 45:36

Okay, so that's the deal is we start there. The water's inflowing warmer than the environment they live in. I'm gonna mention it one more time. If you haven't watched Bass After Dark from this last week, go watch it. Okay, does weather affect fish?

SPEAKER_00 45:53

I'll link it in the show for the folks too.

SPEAKER_01 45:55

You're gonna learn within the first 20 minutes of the guest being on the temperature is extremely important. And once again, from Dr. Keith Jones' book, you're gonna learn that fish have a thermal optimal temperature that they prefer around 85 degrees. And the theory that is uh proven by Dr. Jones is that fish have an acclimation, they're acclimated to whatever the temperature is that they're at right now, but they want to move towards their thermal optimum. So they're in 38 degree water, water comes in, that is 40 degrees. They can feel that temperature change and they will swim to that warmer water. So in your situation, the water is warmer coming in, that drives them to the bank. Then when they get there, the water is warmer in that shallower water, right? So they stay there. Now you have flooded terrestrial, um you have flooded terrestrial vegetation, and you also have all the forage, as in like insects, and you know, maybe not for you guys because it was it was 40 degrees outside, but you know, you have whatever is happening in that in that new environment that is food items for them as well. And it's not just the bass doing this, their food is doing it. The crayfish, if the crayfish are out yet, um all the sunfish, you may have perch, you may have shad, you may have herring, all those fish are moving to this warmer temperature.

SPEAKER_00 47:44

That makes sense. Yeah, it's kind of like us when it's cold out and we see a hot tub.

SPEAKER_01 47:50

Kinda. Kind of a hot tub that also has a cheeseburger stand next to it.

SPEAKER_00 47:56

Right. Yeah, you're at the brewery and you see you're uh at an outdoor patio, it's cold out and you see the heater sitting outside. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 48:02

Yeah, that's exactly right. So that's a good, I mean, that's a good question, but it's all based on temperature. It's relevant because we do have uh we have good verbal explanation of something we've known for you know 20 years, 25 years, uh from Mark Sexton.

SPEAKER_00 48:20

Yeah, yeah. It was super cool to learn that. Just I was in my head, I'm like, uh, it's still super cold, doesn't matter, they're not gonna crash the bank. And I just went and tested it and just to see as can I see them up there? And it there they are, loaded. And it was like, okay, well, that's that's super doesn't matter what water temperature was. Um okay, I have a cool one here. Uh it's actually from Catch Brand, like the catchboards. They actually submitted a question here. Um, this kind of goes back to the Black Bass Symposium we did and some of the conversations talking about why it's important for guys like yourself and other state agencies, fish biologists to be on podcasts. Um, they asked, what are some disconnects between conservation efforts and the general public?

SPEAKER_01 49:05

Disconnects between conservation and the general public. Okay. So I'm gonna start broad and my work narrower. The term conservation is tough because conservation means to preserve, to protect, to restore a resource that's being threatened or lost, right? And for the most part, throughout the United States, largemouth bass are are in no need of preservation or protection or restoration. Smallmouth, you could argue, are being threatened, and especially in certain areas with Alabama bass or just loss of habitat. You could definitely argue that for spotted bass as well. Uh and then we have like regionalized species that occur, like the Guadalupe bass, um some of the former red-eye bass. Like we have these regionalized species that need protection, swanee bass, and just you know, because I'm thinking through them. Like those, there needs to be some conservation work done. So the issue is whenever we're talking about a disconnect, a disconnect is angler's understanding what fish are truly native versus what fish have been introduced. Where, you know, if you look at a largemouth bass and you look at all of the West Coast, that's an introduced species, but so is any other black bass species, all of them introduced. Arizona, California, Utah, Washington State, like none of those are native species. So we're talking conservation. There is no conservation of those species on the West Coast. Now, if we take the word conservation out of it, and we just say, what are the best stewardship? Stewardship is the word I like to use. Stewardship basically means that you are an educated user of a resource, which fits better for what what we're trying to do universally as anglers and as industry supporting these efforts. Stewardship fits better. So, what are the stewardship things and what are the disconnects? There we go. That that makes sense to me. And stewardship of our water resources starts with the water itself, water quality, and that means all the things we're doing within the watershed. And I will guarantee, no matter where you live in the United States, you are part of a watershed. Whether you're in an apartment building, whether you are in the middle of New York City, or you live on acreage out in the country somewhere, you are part of a watershed. Whatever you do flows downstream into something else or is is penetrated into the earth, into uh you know, into our subsurface water. You are part of a watershed. And the fertilizers we use, even the miles we drive on our vehicles, like every mile you drive on the road pulls rubber off your tires, and that rubber becomes a microscopic fragment, microplastic, that goes into your water body. So one of the disconnects is we treat our water fairly poorly just out of ignorance. Now, the good news is um we have a lot of regulation, and um we've done a lot with the Clean Water Act and subsequent work to make sure that we have the best water in the United States possible. And a lot of this even goes back to Ray Scott and BASS. And you know, they're one of the bigger proponents of doing this work. So there are tournament organizations and there are people that are in this industry working towards making sure that your water is clean, not only for drinking, but to support aquatic life. That is happening. But the disconnect is you don't know who's doing that work. Right. If we had a quiz and I said, give me three organizations working on water quality throughout the United States, either within a specific watershed or nationally, you couldn't, you couldn't name one. It's no fault to your own, it's just it is what it is. So there's another disconnect is we not only do we not recognize that where we are and what we're doing impacts our water, we don't recognize who's doing the work to make sure that that is all corrected.

SPEAKER_00 54:05

That's communication, basically.

SPEAKER_01 54:08

Yep. Now then, second, um, there's another second big disconnect, which is anglers judge fisheries based on their personal experience in fish catches. And we imagine a fish that we caught as a reflection of today, but the fish you caught is not a reflection of today. The fish you caught is a reflection of its lifetime. Because if you catch a three-pound bass throughout most of the United States, in the south, that fish could be three years old. In the north, that fish could be seven years old. But it doesn't have to be, it could be older or younger than that, anywhere. But I'm just giving you generalities. We catch a three-pound bass. If I catch it in the south, that tells me about the fishery the last three years. If you catch a three-pound bass, that may tell you about the fishery the last five to seven years. It has nothing to do with today. So we see uh your one of your personal, like I'm I'm on this Cayuga Lake. Yeah, we see them spray vegetation today. And then you don't catch a fish in three weeks. And as an angler, you say, I'm not catching fish because they sprayed. Now, you may not catch a fish in that specific area because they sprayed, because the habitat changed, the water quality changed. Yes, I do agree with that part. But what I disagree with is those fish are gone from the system, don't exist anymore. Or all of a sudden you do catch a fish in that area and it's super skinny. And you go, yeah, that's because of the herbicide. Well, no, probably. We have to look at how big is that fish and what has it been doing the last four years of its life, and why, when the herbicide was sprayed, if all the other fish left the area, why didn't this fish leave?

SPEAKER_00 56:14

Right.

SPEAKER_01 56:16

Like we look at our experience and try to apply it to what is actually happening on that fishery as a broader sense. Our angling experience tells us what's happening on the fishery today, is in how do we catch more fish, but what it doesn't tell us is how the management of that fishery is going necessarily. That makes sense. So there's a disconnect in our perspective of our fish catches. There's a lot of things, like I said that, I will also say there's a lot of things that you can learn from an individual fish catch that does tell you about the management, but it doesn't tell you the whole story. Right. Yeah, so I think go ahead. Oh, so I like it. Yeah, yeah. Um, so I can keep going on disconnects because there are so many of them. Um the I will give you one more. A third disconnect you have, and we've preached it on this show, is you don't actually know who manages your fishery. Not that you don't know the biologist personally, like, okay, who does? But you actually most likely don't know who controls things like water level and discharge water from spillway, aquatic plant control, habitat restoration, fish stocking. Because most likely you have four or five organizations working on one body of water, each independently making decisions in different areas of that, uh, of those topics for managing your lake.

SPEAKER_00 57:58

And most anglers just assume everything is their state agency. Correct. State, fish and wildlife.

SPEAKER_01 58:03

Yeah. Yes. Yeah, you're gonna assume it is this whatever agency. Yeah. Florida's the perfect example because in Florida, um fish and exotic species control are two different parts of FWC. So I don't know, you've probably seen this. Like, get on your social media and find a page where they're spraying. Somebody's posted a reel or TikTok or something about somebody spraying in Florida. And they will always say, look at what your FWC biologists are doing. And the second they say that, I just go, It's it's not the fisheries biologist. They are absolutely not included in this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 58:51

Yeah, different.

SPEAKER_01 58:52

But they work for the same department, but they don't have the same leadership. So the fish biologists that are trying to grow you more bass and say, hey, we need you to take out these fish, or we want to do this, and you're saying, Well, I want you to stop spraying vegetation, and they're saying we're not spraying vegetation, and you're saying, I saw you spray vegetation, I saw your truck there, they're literally not spraying the vegetation. That is somebody else that works for the apartment that is not even a part of the conversation, right? And we need big disconnects because we just don't know.

SPEAKER_00 59:26

Right. Yeah, and again, that goes back to education, communication, and something that I think all parties involved need to somehow be as a cohesive group, which is what we've been working on. And you know, like why Gene Gillen had, you know, the uh the get together at the classic to with podcast groups and conservation groups of well, we need to come to get together on this and find the communication stream once to direct to the angler to help educate everybody because then we can have a better cohesive group to make decisions, I guess, or be able to be better suited, I should say, to make decisions as a group versus have all these different go back to it.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:09

Um, the word is called stewardship. Be better stewards of the environment. Become as educated as you can as a user of that resource.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:17

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:18

I love it. Well, Steve, I have a few more here, but I think we're gonna save them for a future QA because we're coming up on an hour already. Um so we'll have a we'll save them for the hotline shows that are coming up because we do have some cool ones that you're lining up for us with Shane Bush, and uh we have some other stuff down the hopper as well, because the the BPT uh Redcrest is coming up. Um a lot more things down the hopper, but uh with all the the quirky questions, we had to get this this show in here, especially with you writing that article. So that was that's some cool conversation, and hopefully people have some different perspectives. And if you guys do, again, uh reach out to Steve, reach out to us over email or DM on social or even comment down the YouTube. If you guys are watching on YouTube right now, comment down below. But uh Steve, anything else for the folks before we wrap this sucker up?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:05

Nope. I'm headed to Waco. We're gonna go do a habitat project uh as part of the major league fishing event that happened there. Uh stage three, we we donated habitat. Uh, we're gonna go put it out. We've got Texas Bass Nation, uh, their director, Dave Terry, he's gonna join us. We've got Kubota, um, of course, Texas Parks Wildlife. They're they're all coming, and we've got a big group of volunteers. We're gonna go knock that out. Uh, then the end of the month after Red Crest, we're gonna do the same thing at Lake Brownwood. So we're we're busy as can be, man. How about you? You got any tournaments coming up? Getting that kayak out?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:41

Yeah, yeah. We actually had I leave this weekend going down to the next Bassmaster event and kind of near your neck of the woods. I'll be going to Cato and Bistano Lake over in Louisiana. Um, so we'll be there all next week. So looking forward to that one. And yeah, that's that's basically it. We're kind of in like primo derb season starting this weekend. Of basically when I get home from Louisiana, I'm gonna have a tournament almost every weekend going forward. But um looking forward to it. I love it.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:08

Anytime you're gonna be near alligators in the kayak, it makes great content. So I can't wait.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:13

Always they seem to find me before I find them. So looking forward to being more observant. Yeah, I I don't know, I don't know if I've just grown used to them being around or what, but I just I don't know how this northern boy just finds himself in the pocket with the most gators in the lake, but I don't know. We we become friends. Uh hopefully it stays that way. So I love it. Uh looking forward to getting down there as much as I like that the lakes are popping off up here. I do enjoy the travel and uh I got some revenge to get on Canada and Vistino. So I'm looking forward to getting down there. But uh, I'll be hanging around uh a few days in Texas too, so we'll have to connect and see if I can come bother you for your day. But yeah. Either way, folks, appreciate you guys taking time on every day to listen to this. Hopefully, this answers some questions. And again, if you do have more questions based on this or anything we did not talk about, feel free to reach out to us. But as always, appreciate y'all. See you guys on the next one.