Big Carp Fishing Baits And Vital Fish Feeding Secrets!
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…
Blood worms (and jokers) are notorious natural baits known for being banned owing to their extreme success at match venues. This is a good lesson to all carp anglers in how carp feed and exploit their modes of feeding. Fish like carp can feed in many ways, from dashing about after fry, to slowly sifting through silt for many hours with their heads totally buried. It makes logical sense to get to know exactly what your fish is eating at what time of day or night, where and why in order to fully exploit the form of feeding used at any point in time, or to even induce the one you wish the carp to use in order perhaps to hook them more easily by leveraging special bait formats and ingredients.
You may have watched koi or goldfish sucking algae off the sides of a pond. But carp can also feed by filtering tiny items from the water, while moving and even while stationary. The position and concentrations of natural foods like algae and crustaceans called zooplankton or daphnia fluctuate depending on sunlight angle and intensity, temperature and water mineral and oxygen concentrations among other time and seasonal variations. The successful use of very fine ground baits is one way to induce the filter feeding type of modes whilst on the way to the angler inducing feeding on larger food items such as boilies for instance.
You can exploit various feeds and fine liquid additives with particles in suspension to induce this kind of feeding, although there are many endless options for doing this effectively and yeast and liver powders and corn steep liquor and various less refined fish oils are obvious examples to begin with. Fish can taste their food using taste buds located in their pharyngeal cavity so this form of feeding is not sight oriented but taste oriented. Using induced filter and pump filter (gulping type feeding,) fish can get the nutritional stimulation of your free and hook baits without actually touching your baits but then having filter fed on them will often be in a far more excited physiological and mental state when they actually physically feed on them and carp filter feed predominantly in turbid waters.
Filter feeding is very interesting because fish like carp can gain masses of nutrients to promote their growth in safe ways without eating your baits. But they can also derive nutrients from your baits in suspension and in solution as they leach out amino acids, nucleic acids, oils and slats for instance, without actually eating your baits. So it makes sense to drive fish into a feeding frenzy mode as far as possible by inciting this natural feeding mode.
It is natural for fish like bream, roach, carp, tench, barbel, and even bass and trout, to filter feed at times by capturing various sized food particles within their branchial sieves. However there this sieving can be adjusted in order to capture patches of fine particles or to capture larger single items and the characteristic speed of this feeding can vary between species. In the case of carp which are termed slow suction feeders, although they can suck up finer particles from one head length away from it at surprisingly high velocities indeed.
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!
The fine filter feeding mode predominance found with carp in lakes especially is really a reflection of the most dominant abundance of smaller food items available throughout most of the year such as fluctuating populations of fly larvae, tubifex, daphnia, and other benthic organisms as well as algae etc from which carp drive essential amino acids, and pigments like cantaxanthin etc. Many anglers say smaller baits are better for catching carp even though this species and many others become conditioned to eat large boilies, pellets and particles of 20 millimetres and over. But the fact is the smaller baits are more easily consumed for less energy cost compared to many larger ones and the fact that far less anglers presently use tiny boilies on their hook rig is a bit beside the point here.
How many big carp get hooked by match anglers at the end of a day of baiting up constantly with tiny pouches of fine bread crumb and fish meal and tiny micro pellet ground baits; it happens far more often than carp anglers like to imagine. The constant ground baiting is one factor along with the fine tackle they use, but mostly, match anglers are offering carp the ideal form of ground bait to exploit their natural filter feeding modes. Literally matching up your bait to the feeding modes of fish and even influencing which mode and feeding intensity occurs can seriously improve your catches all season; it just takes a little bait know-how…
By Tim Richardson.
