by Bruce Middleton, January 24, 2008

Why we use attractants that appeal to a bass’s nose…

In the underwater world of the bass they use their senses much like we do but theirs are much more heightened in order for them to find food and survive in their watery world. In the environment of the bass, the underwater world can seem foreign to us even though we spend a great amount of time on top of it fishing for them. Being under water is not at all like being above it. The light levels change as you go deeper, sound travels faster and the water clarity is different. A bass uses his senses of hearing, sight, touch and smell to hunt with and for survival. Many things about bass behavior are instinctual though, like spawning and the seasonal movements. But the every day world of finding food and surviving is learned the hard way and not all bass fry avoid all the pitfalls of this world. In fact, less than 2% grow up to be of any size at all.

The bass is a top predator in many of the lakes it inhabits. But like most predators, only enough survive to balance out with the food supply. So in order to be one of the survivors a bass must be very good indeed at using his senses from the time it is a fry to the time it is too big to be eaten itself and then into old age.

Touch is an important sense underwater as at night when a lot of bass feed they use their whole bodies to detect the slightest movement of small animals like crawfish that they love to eat. During the day they use these lateral lines to hunt with but the eyes are just as much if not more useful unless the bass lives in really dirty water. They also use their sense of touch for fighting and during the spawn when nudging the female in order for her to drop her cache of eggs so the male can fertilize them. They also use their sense of touch when they intake a food item. It must feel right and taste right before a bass will swallow it.

A bass’s vision is 4 times better than ours is under water. Not only that but a bass can see one of the widest spans of colors in the animal kingdom. They can see fishing line, hooks and even smaller objects like the antennae of crawfish from great distances when their body is hidden. It is designed to see farther because it often is a sight feeder and it always looks at what it is about to strike. It never strikes blindly at food. We use a rainbow of colors to enhance our lures and baits so that they will appeal to bass. We use single and multiple colors ranging from translucent to fluorescent in our search for that lure color that will appeal to the bass on that lake on that day under those circumstances.

Sound travels 6 times faster underwater and a bass has grown a massive tail proportional to it’s body size so it can make lightning fast sprints out of a hiding place to catch and eat smaller baitfish that it hears moving around it. We use sonic chambers with bb’s or steel balls in them to make sounds that attract bass to them. We use sound vibrations to draw in bass from long distances to our lures as we fan cast in search of them. The bass’s ears and the bass’s lateral lines pick up sound vibrations. The lateral lines are made for picking up low frequency noises while the bass’s ears are made more for picking up high frequency noises. But together they help the bass pinpoint the direction where the noise is coming from and so the bass can turn in that direction and swim to where the noise originated. The bass’s tail is used to track down prey items. A bass can sprint up to twelve miles and hours. This means it can swim faster than you can reel in a lure at top speed. So if a bass sees a lure he has more than enough speed to catch it.

But the sense of smell seems to be one of the most overriding senses the bass uses. That is to say that if a bass sees prey and charges it but at the last second it smells odd or bad the bass will terminate the strike and go back to his ambush point. We know a bass has a huge nose organ. It is a highly evolved sense organ that is extremely large given the size of the bass. And we know that as the bass grows so does the olfactory organ or what does the smelling and then transmits the information to the brain. This organ can double or even triple in size by the time a bass is in its old age. So they have a sense organ of smell that is extra, extra large to begin with and then they double or even triple it’s size by the time the bass is 10 plus pounds up here in one of our lakes. That bass would be very discriminating indeed when it came to eating anything that didn’t smell exactly right.

Over the last few decades we have strived to enhance the appeal of smell of our lures and baits by adding different kinds of scents to them. But these were more of a masking type scent and not overly successful. We have tried garlic, anise and other oils. We have tried crushing baitfish, crawfish and salmon eggs and extracting those juices for use as scents and lately we have gone high-tech and are now finding pheromones that the fish use for communications as scents. And we have even found a scent that triggers hunger in a bass. These new hi-tech scents are pheromones.

When first starting to make bass scents way back when, a lot of manufactures used ground up crawfish and shad. Then they would test their product on tanked bass (a small pond with bass in it) that they kept just for this reason. What one company found out (Berkley) was that some parts of the shad were totally repulsive to the bass. Now this was quite a surprise but then when a bass swallows a whole shad he takes in the good with the bad. By removing the bad parts of the shad and extracting the essential oils from these crushed parts they created a new Tournament strength formula. This new formula increased catches by 50% verses any other method. It was an overnight sensation.

Now all of these scents work to some degree or other. The new pheromone scents seem to be the most promising verses the old alternatives. Unlike the old scents pheromones don’t float up to the surface, rather they saturate the level the bait or lure is at leaving a scent trail for the bass to follow or they saturate a brush pile that you are fishing. But no matter what scent we add, in order to make them work to their fullest we must have a clean and odor free surface to apply them to, to start with. All to many times petroleum and other products that were used during the year or last year or even the year before contaminate the lures and baits we use. This leaves you adding a great scent to a lure that smells bad to a bass. So what can you do? Well you could do what I did when I though I had a tackle box full of contaminated lures. I took them all and dumped them into a large tub and with a stick and some unscented detergent, I washed them all. Then I scrubbed the inside of the tackle box before putting the lures back in. Remember to rinse everything very, very well to get rid of the soap residue. And make sure you use a non-scented soap.

Now I did have some packages of plastics in the bottom of the tackle box. Those that were sealed closed I washed the bag but those that were open I threw away. I know now that my whole tackle box is clean and odor free. The only thing to do when you go fishing is to wash your hands in lake water and make sure you don’t touch any gas lines, sun tan oil or any other contaminate. I also use a dab of vanilla or even bass scent on my hands so when I handle my lures and baits they only have attractant on them. This will pay off big time in more and bigger bass every time you go fishing. As for the tackle box cleaning, well now is a good time as it is winter and you have lots of time to do it.

Now to be perfectly honest there are many fast moving lures you can use without scent or contaminated with scent that really make no difference to the bass. These reaction lures include, some crank baits, spinner baits and buzz baits. All these lures are retrieved so fast that smell usually doesn’t come into play. Any fast moving lure or bait must be chased down by the bass, and the bass is purely sight feeding at this time. But on slow moving baits and lures like a jig, tube and other plastics, scent is a must. You are moving the bait very slowly if at all and the bass has time to investigate the bait. It must smell right and it must look right before a bass will strike it. There are very few reaction strikes on contaminated slow moving lures.

So, in the watery world of a bass, vibrations are picked up by a basses lateral lines. He then moves in that direction until he can see the object. Between his eyes and his nose he can tell if the vibrations are being sent out by a food item or a predator. His nose can tell him what quality the food item is and if it is worth his effort to chase it. If he strikes it he uses his eyes for the attack and his nose for a final confirmation that this is food. Other wise he will veer off and leave it alone. Crawfish, minnows, worms and other food all have a common feature that the bass’s nose can sense. The bass uses these to distinguish what type of food item he smells. Scents reduce or remove the negative factors of smell while increasing the positive factors to an extent that the bass is stimulated into striking it. The eyes and nose of a bass work in unison in the final moments of a strike, both sending back information to the brain. If no negative factors are introduced then the bass will strike. One other thing you might consider is to always use crawfish, garlic and some other scents on bottom slow moving lures and shad scents on any lure that is not used on the bottom. This way a bass can sense that a crawfish should smell like a bottom creature and a fish scent is always associated with swimming lures. This seems like a common sense approach as to which scent to add to which bait or lure.

One of the main effects of this scent use is that the bass will hang onto the bait longer. This gives the angler more time to detect the strike and then to set the hook. This is a huge benefit to the angler as most fishermen only detect one in five strikes on slow moving jigs and plastics. Anything that boosts your odds of detecting a strike is of great importance.
In addition to the new research of looking for an ever more attractive scent, researchers have found that four major smells that are real turn offs for bass. They are the smell of tobacco products, sunscreen, insect repellant and fragrances.

The smell of tobacco or rather the nicotine that is in the smoke that gets on your hands just make bass run the other way. This applies to chewing tobacco too. Sunscreen has chemicals in it that bass really turn their nose up at. Now sunscreen is important to use as it protects you from sunburns now and Melanoma later in life. So the thing to do is apply sunscreen then wash your hands thoroughly with lake water and soap or apply the sunscreen at home first and wash your hands there before you go fishing. Either way will work but I always wash my hands in lake water in case I accidentally contaminated them somewhere before I start fishing.

Insect repellant like sunscreen has chemicals in it that bass find offensive. Deet is the main ingredient that is the offender. And fragrances are offensive to bass too but they are sometimes harder to find and eliminate that single products like sunscreen. This is because fragrances are put in soap, are used in after shave, are found in shampoo and a million other products that are hard to eliminate from our daily life. But soap is probably the easiest to deal with since that is what we wash our hands with. A non-fragrance soap like Ivory or other soaps are just the ticket for keeping a bar in your tackle box. A plastic soapbox like the kind you use in the military or for traveling is perfect for storing your soap in, while not letting it touch anything in the tackle box. They can be found at any travel stores some dollar stores and even in some pharmacies. They cost about a dollar and that is good deal for what fishermen need it for. Or you can use any plastic container with a tight lid on it and put in a bar or a part of a bar of soap. Tupperware is found in just about every house, so go look for a small one with a lid and there you go.

While these are the main offenders for producing bad smell that bass avoid there are a few other ones to avoid if you can. Waterless moist toilettes are one. These have alcohol and other ingredients in them that give off some bad smells. Chap stick is a minor offender and you get it on the line when lubricating it so the knot slides tight. I feel like I should be wearing those thin latex gloves sometimes when I go fishing now just so my hands are always scent free but they are uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time and I doubt if they really work any better than a clean pair of hands.

Now I have heard of WD-40 being used as an attractant but I honestly thing that it is either a cover up or masking agent and not a true attractant. I don’t subscribe to the group that uses it as I honestly think that it has petrochemical ingredients in it and that means a bad odor to the bass. But like they say, some people swear by it and some people swear at it.

So to answer the question posed at the beginning of this article, do scents make sense. Yes they do and in a big way. If you can eliminate any bad or offensive smell to your baits and lures and add a positive smell that the bass identifies as food, then that bass is much more likely to strike that bait or lure. This translates into more strikes, more fish in the live well and bigger fish. I added bigger fish because they can be lured into biting great smelling baits and lures despite their huge olfactory organ. And in the end we as fishermen turn around and fish more because we are now catching more bass.

The national average for catching a bass is 2.3 hours of fishing per one bass caught. By arming yourself with all positive attractants on your baits and lures and eliminating all the negatives, you can begin to improve on this national average.

Bruce Middleton

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