Few carp fishermen realise that fish can switch their modes of feeding and you can exploit these and manipulate these to catch more fish! In fact you can make fish feed in the specific way you want by the form and size of baits you introduce as ground bait or chum making it ideal for far more natural and confident feeding leading to more bites.
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.
Many carp anglers do not realise carp can feed on items as small as algae and tiny zooplankton crustaceans, even under a millimetre in size and derive extremely significant nutrition from such small organisms. These are very rich foods and are often exploited when fluctuations of populations are especially favourable and in spring and summer help in the time leading up to and after spawning. The success of fine particulate feeds like fine fish meal and bread crumb ground baits in many ways echo this mode of feeding which in this case can occur at any level in the water or sediment.
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.
Carp actually derive very significant nutrition by filter feeding as this is the primary mode of feeding used especially in turbid lakes. It is a great advantage to use this mode to good effect, and I have had outstanding success for bigger carp fishing over ground bait and forms of more soluble boilies and pellets forms over deep silt in smaller turbid lakes; where catching filter feeding carp can be very difficult with more conventional approaches and large baits and pellets etc. This method of feeding exploitation can drive fish into a feeding frenzy even though no solid bait has actually been consumed yet!
Carp, barbel and tench and even trout and bass feed to varying degrees using filter feeding and they use branchial sieves to do so. These are adjustable in order to catch the most profitable nutritious particles sizes available, depending on concentration and abundance. These are also adjusted to catch batches of particles or individual large ones. In feeding terms, carp are categorised as suction feeders and slow ones at that, but that hides the fact that they can suck up items at a tremendously powerful velocity when required which has great rig implications especially when a fish is filter feeding on food at a long distance from the fish's head where long rigs and critically balanced baits have great benefits!
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!
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. - 16463
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.
Many carp anglers do not realise carp can feed on items as small as algae and tiny zooplankton crustaceans, even under a millimetre in size and derive extremely significant nutrition from such small organisms. These are very rich foods and are often exploited when fluctuations of populations are especially favourable and in spring and summer help in the time leading up to and after spawning. The success of fine particulate feeds like fine fish meal and bread crumb ground baits in many ways echo this mode of feeding which in this case can occur at any level in the water or sediment.
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.
Carp actually derive very significant nutrition by filter feeding as this is the primary mode of feeding used especially in turbid lakes. It is a great advantage to use this mode to good effect, and I have had outstanding success for bigger carp fishing over ground bait and forms of more soluble boilies and pellets forms over deep silt in smaller turbid lakes; where catching filter feeding carp can be very difficult with more conventional approaches and large baits and pellets etc. This method of feeding exploitation can drive fish into a feeding frenzy even though no solid bait has actually been consumed yet!
Carp, barbel and tench and even trout and bass feed to varying degrees using filter feeding and they use branchial sieves to do so. These are adjustable in order to catch the most profitable nutritious particles sizes available, depending on concentration and abundance. These are also adjusted to catch batches of particles or individual large ones. In feeding terms, carp are categorised as suction feeders and slow ones at that, but that hides the fact that they can suck up items at a tremendously powerful velocity when required which has great rig implications especially when a fish is filter feeding on food at a long distance from the fish's head where long rigs and critically balanced baits have great benefits!
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!
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. - 16463
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For insider bait secrets proven for big fish see: "BIG CATFISH AND CARP BAIT SECRETS!" And "BIG CARP BAIT SECRETS!" And "FLAVORS, FEEDING TRIGGERS And CHEMORECEPTION SECRETS" SEE: fishing baits Get the best now!
