Big Carp Fishing Baits And Vital Fish Feeding Secrets!
Top fishermen know that by exploiting the way your target fish feed at any time of day or night or time of the season, they can reliably improve their catches and keep catching more consistently than the average angler. This is one very significant bait and rig subject which is neglected by the majority of anglers. In fact fish like carp change their mode of feeding all the time even over a 24 hour period or in an instant and you can manipulate and induce changes in feeding to catch far more fish!
If you ever fished a match using tiny hooks for bloodworm or jokers as bait, you will know how powerful these fish catching baits are. One of the best feeding triggers for carp and one of the most abundant amino acids found in mature carp tissues is alanine which also happens to be found in abundance in blood worms and jokers. Fish instinctively feed in the most energy efficient way depending on the food supply available and how and where it is located and how spread out or dense or large or small the food items are.
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.
The chemical senses of carp are often mentioned in relation to bait, but the role of the carp lateral line is far less mentioned. The electrical sensitivity of this area in food detection is often severely over-looked by anglers seeking to improve their baits and it is so finely tuned it can detect the tiny movements of zooplankton. As carp are primarily filter feeders using slower suction motions compared to other fish, it makes sense to exploit this by using fine ground baits and smaller hook baits too!
Although filter feeding modes in carp reflect their most dominant small sized natural foods you can overcome their preoccupation with these to get them to feed on your fishing baits by also using fine particulate feeds and smaller baits at least to begin with in your ground baits, method mixes, stick mixes etc. Many carp in pressured fisheries regard eating 21 millimetre pellets nad boilies as natural as they literally depend on them for essential dietary requirements, but it does not mean using hook baits of this size make it easier to catch warier fish. The finding is that smaller baits do often fool carp better than large baits and this is not merely due to the fact that proportionately far greater numbers of anglers use baits over 1 centimetre in size…
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.
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