practically invisible? We go to astonishing lengths to ensure that our baits have the best smell and taste triggers that money can buy and as far as I am concerned that is all we need to do. Carp feed primarily by using their senses of smell and taste. Sight is obviously significant, but only up to a point.
I have always been happy with my drab coloured fishmeals, relying entirely on appealing to a carp’s senses of smell and taste to achieve success. Surely these are the carp’s prime senses for detecting food? Do they really need to be able to detect colours? Do they even need to physically see their food? Take as an example the case of a totally blind carp (no eye sockets, let alone eyes!) that lived in a well known lake down in my neck of the woods during the 80s and 90s, a carp that lived to a ripe old age and attained a weight well over twenty pounds, even though it couldn’t see a thing, let alone discriminate between colours!
Do we really know definitively whether carp are capable of truly identifying and isolating colour? There is a huge wealth of information out there about colour vision in fish but much of it is open to different interpretations. One thing’s for sure, a carp’s colour vision cannot and should not be compared to our own, nor for that matter to that of a sea bass! I believe that purely and simply because they want to believe it is so, fishermen tend to be convinced that fish see the same visible spectrum that humans do and that angler’s brightly coloured baits are important in attracting their quarry. I would suggest that that assumption is very much open to question!
I think we fool ourselves by comparing our vision with the carp’s in much the same way as many of us do with the sense of smell. Humans and carp are different animals and while we have senses in common, they are not configured in the same way and cannot even begin to compare with each other. I get really quite angry when I read articles that show a bright looking hookbait sitting over a carpet of other baits on a lovely clean patch of gravel, the author extolling how “bright and enticing that hookbait looks”. Of course if bloody well does! It was photographed in six inches of water with a bright sun beaming down at noon on the longest day! How bright and enticing do you think that same hookbait would look in thirty feet of dirty water on an overcast day in December with a gale of wind whipping up the lake surface to a frenzy?
All animals respond to light, but to see there must be a means of detecting that light. We think of our eyes as being the primary way of detecting images in our everyday life but in fact it is the brain that does the actual ‘seeing’. The eye simply contains the optical system that produces the image via a large number of light detectors. Although we detect light with our eyes, we actually ‘see’ with our brain where the light signals received by our eyes are interpreted. It is the brain that perceives the fact and the colour of what we are seeing using the benefit of previous experience.
Most animals have colour vision and this varies from species to species. The ability to see in colour depends on being able to detect and respond to different wavelengths of light and assess the signals received by the brain as colour differences. The ability to detect light is a vital part of every day living, yet the eyes of living creatures differ considerably, as do the nervous systems to which their eyes are linked. A cat, a dog and a lizard all looking at the same object will see it differently, and in turn, their perception is vastly different to what we perceive.
Bait Colour and Colour Detection Part 1
Just how great a part does the colour of a bait play in determining whether a carp picks it up or not?
Do carp really need to be able to detect colours? Do they even need to physically see their food? This totally blind fish seems to be doing fine!
These imitation baits are very popular these days but why do they catch? Is it because of their colour or maybe their smell, or is it due to the baiting situation in which they are used?
Look at this photo. Which of the sensory organs on view here would you think are the most important? For me it’s as follows a) the olfactory organs, b) the taste sensors inside the mouth, c) the barbules and d) the eyes…in that order.
In this photo the water appears quite clear with a nice tinge of colour. It is bright sunlight with the sun almost overhead and you’d think that light penetration would be excellent.
In actual fact the lake is very heavily coloured with suspended organic matter, and as you can see from this photo, visibility at the surface is a matter of a few inches. It will be even less 3m down!
How much light penetration is likely under these foggy conditions…yet fish still get caught on drab and dull baits when it’s like this.
By Ken Townley (with significant input from Gert Louster.)
It is no secret that I often browse the carp forums searching for posts asking questions about the many varied aspects of carp fishing. As a source of inspiration for topics for this column they are unsurpassed. One thread that attracts a significant number of views whenever it crops up is the subject of colour vision. With this in mind I thought I would resurrect some material I had published back in 2005, when, together with Professor Gert Louster – of great repute – we looked long and hard at the question of just how carp perceive (or fail to perceive) the colour of our baits.
At the time one particular magazine was hyping the importance of colour over and over again. What they failed to tell the readers was that the source of their wisdom was a book about fishing for bass in salt water. A harder comparison to fishing for carp in fresh water would be difficult to find!
Yet still I see posts and articles making false statements and making illogical claims.
I also think that there exists today a large proportion of carp anglers who have
been brainwashed into believing everything they read, hear or see. A prime example
is the guy who came up to me when I was fishing last year and insisted that I would
never catch anything on my drab coloured fishmeal hookbait. “They only go for the
brightest fluoros in here,” he told me. I thanked him for the heads up and proceeded
to land four fish in an afternoon while his Day-
This kind of brainwashed mentality seems more and more prevalent in our current carp world where many anglers take the word of the great and the good (many of whom don’t even write their own articles by the way) as gospel. For instance, going back to my contact with the brainwashed fluoro fellow…like him, many anglers seem to think that the actual colour of their carp bait plays an essential, nay a VITAL part in determining his chances of success. I have been around the block several times and have heard this dogma being championed many times, and frankly I am far from convinced. In fact, when I make a bait its colour never even enters into consideration. I can tell you hand on heart that the colour of my baits, both free offerings and hookbaits, is not now, nor has it ever been a factor for me in over forty years of carp fishing.
Here’s one for you. If colour is so important, why do dark coloured fishmeals work?
How can colour be a factor given that they are so bland-
Fish can see some colours and experiments have been carried out that appear to indicate that they are capable of showing preferences depending on species and environment. However, specifics are hard to come by and mostly the findings are blurred and comparatively inexact. For instance, there are huge differences between the vision of salt and fresh water fish due to differing water density. What a blue fin tuna can see has little or no bearing on a carp’s underwater colour vision.
As I have mentioned we are aware that carp can see infrared light at wavelengths that are normally invisible to us. This helps them to see in murky water, where the longer wavelengths of infrared will be scattered less than the shorter wavelengths of our visible spectrum. However, there is no evidence whatsoever to support the fact that being able to see in the infrared spectrum aids colour determination. In fact, the only way we can see in infrared is by using an infrared camera, but all this does is enhance low light vision and everything we see through the lens appears solely as shades of grey. Do we know that this situation is any different in fish? No, we don’t, and I’ll look into this in next week’s issue.
Ken Townley