by Tim Richardson
It will probably come as a surprise to many fishermen that fish alternate frequently between one feeding mode and another, in order to best profit from various food opportunities available in the aquatic environment even within a short time period and this can change many times even over an hour or 24 hour period. The way fish feed is key to how best to tempt them in order to get a hook in their mouth and catch them, but few anglers actually give this immensely important subject the attention it demands. But the good news is that you can induce many fish feeding modes simply and easily in order to catch more fish purely by exploiting what comes naturally to them...

It is well-known that jokers and blood worms have often been banned as baits from various fisheries because they impact upon the feeding behaviour of fish so much. Many species of fish and in particular the Cyprindae genus of fish, have many adaptations which help them switch between modes of feeding to exploit the higher profitabilities of one mode over another, depending on which forms of food are available and where they are located in the water or bottom sediment.

For instance, fish can harvest the extremely nutrient rich algae purely by sucking on stones and gravel. They can also particulate feed and filter on zooplankton and algae for instance in the upper layers of the water in spring and summer especially when building up reserves of energy before and after spawning activities. This reflects in the ways that fine bread and fish meal based ground baits can be fed upon in ways where the fish do not have to actually feed on the bottom, but consume it higher up in the water in suspension.

This kind of feeding or similar can be used to further explore the potential of your hook baits and free baits as food items even before your bait is actually touched by a fish. You might have seen a fish suddenly dart towards a bait after having started gulping in water first to taste your bait more efficiently using taste buds in the pharyngeal cavity in the gill area. Fish also use gulping in a snapping motion in a mobile pump feeding) or static position to filter feed and particulate feed and carp and bream do this much of the time in turbid lakes; lazy of what!

When filter feeding and using similar and related modes, carp can actually benefit from you baits nutrition and attraction without even touching them which definitely has its advantages if you use this to excite them fully before they actually feed. Such things as vegetable and fish oils, fine crustacean and milk extract powders and liver and digestive tract extracts for example, can all be exploited, but there are thousands of choices. You bait substances through carp filter feeding can induce a feeding frenzy state even before your carp have even swallowed a single bait!

Bass and trout and even carp, bream and fish like crappie roach and barbel all filter feed to different degrees. This finely adjusted feeding is achieved using what is called the branchial sieve structures which are adjusted in order to energy efficiently exploit more abundant nutritious food particles and natural organisms. Carp can even suction filter feed at least an equal head length away from its head which is similar in energy and movement efficiency as a sheep seen feeding on grass on its knees although fish use far less energy in general movement compared to terrestrial animals not supported in water.

It often seems to be the case that carp fishing baits focus goes on chemical smells for instance which are very obvious to our senses, but it needs to be remembered that fish have extremely fine tuned lateral line cells which use electrochemical impulses in the detection of food items even by the tiny movements of zooplankton only 1 millimetre in diameter. The gape size of a fish's mouth is normally not a limiting factor in efficient feeding, but the diameter of the area where the food is chewed is and it is often far less than the gape of the mouth. Therefore its makes sense to exploit this and use smaller baits than often recommended. In fact carp in turbid lakes predominantly depend on food which is in particle size, so why not go with this approach not against it!

Smaller food items can naturally be passed to the throat teeth in mouthfuls without any problem and of course the more energy efficient the food delivery system is the better. It can often be the case that small baits are the preferred choice of more experienced big fish anglers because they can see the benefits of smaller food items in regards how fish feed on such baits and also their more natural weight, size and movement in water when combined with a correctly balanced hook rig. I find boilies in the 6 to 8 millimetre size excellent for bigger more wary fish even with huge mouths!

If you exploit the various filter feeding modes of fish using various grades of ingredients both soluble and insoluble in your ground baits you can certainly induce far more intense and suitable feeding for hooking wary big carp. You might recall the fact that fish are lateral lines are tuned to feel the movements of live foods like maggots and sound is important in ground bait effectiveness, but smaller hook baits are well recommended in conjunction with this. With carp one thing is for sure and that is when you leverage their mode of feeding or preferably specifically induce particular modes of intense feeding, you can vastly improve your catches all year round and all you need to know is a bit more about effective bait use and ingredients manipulation...

By Tim Richardson.