Pavlov’s dogs, fed for days at the sounding of a bell, began to salivate at the chime with no food in sensory range. Few witness that kind of conditioning, but perhaps you’ve seen a dog cower at the sound of newspaper being rolled up. Basically, that’s what smallmouths are doing around your boat.
Fishing pressure creates multifaceted problems for anglers. Harvest, always part of the equation unless regulations call for catch and release only, takes a toll. And no matter how careful catch-and-release anglers are, a certain percentage of hooked fish will die, so mortality is always a factor. Pressure culls the most aggressive specimens (the ones that grow heavy fast) out of the mix. Survivors become even more cautious. Conditioning occurs, wherein bass learn to avoid things that led to bad experiences in the past.
Conditioning is the hardest concept for some anglers to wrap their minds around. Fish may not be able to qualify what’s real with the sophistication of a human, but it’s equally true that we tend to underestimate the abilities of fish. Consider what we’ve learned in the past 20 years.
With respect to describing fish behavior, the word “instinct” (which basically means “I don’t know”) has become increasingly passé, replaced by terms and descriptions that define animals with some cognitive ability. Biologists now believe bass use day length to time migrations. Walleyes and bass successfully navigate to frequently used areas, over distances that cover miles, suspended, with no shoreline or structure in sight. Laboratory scientists have determined bass can distinguish between identical targets, learning quickly to strike the one that releases food and learning just as quickly to avoid the one that gives them a mild electric shock.
It would be indefensible to maintain bass can’t learn. If bass can learn to avoid electric shock, they can learn to avoid other things that cause them discomfort, pain, or stress. Professional bass anglers discuss “conditioning” all the time, typically focusing on how bass can learn to avoid lure types used by the majority of anglers on any given body of water. But that’s just the proverbial tip of the iceberg.
The Effects of Pressure on Smallmouths
Frank Campbell has been guiding people to giant smallmouths on Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and the Niagara River for 17 years. “The most dramatic change in the fishing over that time period involves the education of fish,” he says. “Smallmouths are forcing us to look for new and innovative methods they haven’t seen. We have a lot more players in the game these days. When I first started, you had guys out there, but on an average day you may have seen 6 boats. Now you’re seeing 20 boats chasing smallmouths on that average day.
Anglers are better educated than they were 20 years ago, with more television shows, more websites, and more information available. Twenty years ago, those other guys weren’t catching the fish you were. Now they’re sticking good fish, too. Then all you needed was a couple bags of tubes. Now, you may have a hard time catching any number of them on tubes. Then, you had guys fishing shoreline spots. Now, with better electronics, guys are finding key offshore spots in one day, the same spots that took me 10 years to find.”
It’s an old story, and fishermen like Campbell adapt to pressure (as explained later). But adaptation can’t overcome all aspects of pressure.
As a former resource manager, In-Fisherman Field Editor Gord Pyzer has studied some of the fallout from fishing pressure. “I was fortunate enough to work for the Ministry of Natural Resources and to live on Lake of the Woods for 32 years,” he says. “In the late 1970s smallmouth bass were flying under everybody’s radar. Any fish without a white dot on its tail was thrown back. So, if you were fortunate enough to be a bass angler, it was common to catch 40 to 75 quality fish almost any time after the prespawn wave of bass moved shallow into this particular bay.”
Pyzer says he recommended that bay as the site for an ongoing study on spawning behavior, based on the work of Dr. Mark Ridgway. “I went snorkeling with the biologists, helping them tag fish,” Pyzer recalls. “Every 6 feet, all around us, big smallmouths were sitting on nests. It was an amazing thing to see.”
Many bass were marked with floy tags, and many were implanted with radio tags that allowed tracking for over 3 years. “Over that 3-year period, interest in smallmouth fishing exploded exponentially, and so did the pressure,” Pyzer says. “Today in that same spawning bay, which is one of the most classic smallmouth sites on the lake, you probably won’t catch a single bass during most trips through it, even during the best spring weather in prime conditions.
“The problem, of course, as written about so often in In-Fisherman, is that these smallmouth belong to the group that stays put. They’re crawfish feeders and they home to specific ranges in the spring, summer, fall, and winter. They do not move or wander. In fact, we initially thought many of the bass had died after we tagged them because they moved so little, often less than 100 yards over a week or two. The site offered so much food in the form of crayfish, they did not have to expend any energy. Unfortunately, that characteristic worked against them, because stay-at-home smallies will not move, no matter how much pressure you put on them.
“And while I’m certain that some of the fish have become educated and conditioned, the more salient fact remains: There are simply far fewer bass in that bay today as a result of fishing pressure, and the ones that remain are much smaller. It’s almost identical to what happened on Lac Seul when word leaked about muskies. In less than 6 years, creel data revealed it was taking anglers twice as long to catch a muskie half the size.
“Stay-at-home populations of smallmouth bass are much more vulnerable to fishing pressure than the smallmouth populations that follow openwater pelagic baitfish. Those populations are here today, gone tomorrow, and better able to stand up to the pressure that inevitably builds and follows.”
