How many times have you fellow muskie nuts said, "The fish came in hot with her nose right on the bait and then she didn't eat. I can't believe it!"

That idea of the fish having their noses right on the bait got me thinking and then doing some research to see what role smell plays in their feeding behavior. It turns out that muskies and pike are certainly not the olfactory champions of the fish world (that would be sharks), but they have a pretty good sense of smell. Further, studies have shown that the various sensory systems of muskies play different roles in the different parts of a feeding sequence. Typically, a muskie begins with visual location of their prey. Their eyes are each connected only to the opposite sides of their brains. Though they see fine out to the sides and even a little to the rear, their predation reflex is best provoked when both sides of their brains are being stimulated, or when the prey is in their area of binocular vision, out in front of them. At that point, they almost always begin stalking their prey (in the studies, immediate strikes without stalking occur only about 20% of the time), using mostly their pectoral and caudal fins, so that is why they hardly seem to be moving when they follow a bait. It isn't until they decide to eat that they use their tail fin, which bends the body into the S-curve that spells bad news for a perch or cisco or walleye. So the follows we get are not something weird, but part of the deal, except they probably go on longer because the fish aren't really getting the right cues from our artificial baits. As Herbie says, "If the fish wanted that bait, it would have hit it way out and you couldn't have gotten it away from her."

Now here is where it starts to get interesting. As the fish closes in on the prey or lure, the lateral line, which detects minute changes in pressure in the water, begins to become more and more important. In the real strike itself, the lateral line may be more important than sight. The fish are using their chemical senses as much as sight in the infighting. Blinded fish are as successful at feeding as healthy fish, though they strike from closer in. Fish whose lateral lines have been wiped out by surgery or chemicals also feed successfully visually, but blind and lateral-line deprived fish can't feed at all (and those kinds of experiments are why I'm no longer a scientist).

So what does this have to do with fishing or lures? Well, a muskie is constantly constructing a picture of its world from its senses, just like we are. They see the flash of a lure and orient to it as possibly something to eat. They follow and sense the vibrations and they know: pike=lunch! But what if it is a double 10 blade bait? In their world there is no such thing as something whizzing through the water flashing and vibrating that is not food, so they follow the dumb thing, often with their nose right behind it. Almost certainly, they are trying to get all the clues they can about what it is, and smell is doubtless one of the most important of those clues. If there is no smell, or only the foreign smell of reel oil or human hand, then likely we are going to have to go crazy with the figure eight to provoke them to eat something that doesn't really add up to food.

So, what if we started to put scent on muskie lures like walleye and bass anglers do? Have people been doing this regularly and I'm the only one who doesn't know? Has anybody got experience with doing it? How did it turn out?

Bill Hedden