| How Smart Are Fish? To understand fish, you need to realize that they don't rely on their brains as much as their instincts. From the day a fish is born, it must wage a battle for survival. It learns to rely on its highly-developed senses, and it develops a keen ability to sense when "something is wrong." That explains a lot about why it is hard to catch big fish. They got to be big -- and old -- by becoming cautious survivors. Fish also have moods. Not happy and sad moods, but what we might call "activity" moods. Nature has equipped fish with those instincts for survival, and that includes a feel for when to become very aggressive and eat like mad, and when to sit quietly and save energy. If a fish in a river spent the entire day fighting the heaviest current, it would rapidly burn up calories and become thin and weak. The fish knows this by instinct, and seeks areas of slacker water to hold in, waiting for food to wash by.
By the same token, a fish in a lake doesn't swim around all day chasing baitfish. And fish don't sit very long in direct sunlight at most times of the year. They know how to work just hard enough to get the food they need for survival. In other words, they are efficient. As we will discuss, fishing activity is affected by a number of factors, including the weather. Don't expect fish to be "biting good" all the time. In general, fish in clear water bite better during periods of low light, such as early in the morning, late in the evening, and even at night. Low light periods can also occur in the middle of the day, when clouds cover the sun, or when a calm day changes to windy or stormy and waves affect the surface. In general, fish move shallower during periods of low light. Fish in darker water might bite best during periods of heavy sunshine, because to them that's when they get enough light to feed efficiently. |
