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!
Blood worms (and jokers) are notorious natural baits known for being banned owing to their extreme success at match venues. This is a good lesson to all carp anglers in how carp feed and exploit their modes of feeding. Fish like carp can feed in many ways, from dashing about after fry, to slowly sifting through silt for many hours with their heads totally buried. It makes logical sense to get to know exactly what your fish is eating at what time of day or night, where and why in order to fully exploit the form of feeding used at any point in time, or to even induce the one you wish the carp to use in order perhaps to hook them more easily by leveraging special bait formats and ingredients.
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.
When filter feeding and using similar and related modes, carp can actually benefit from you baits nutrition and attraction without even touching them which definitely has its advantages if you use this to excite them fully before they actually feed. Such things as vegetable and fish oils, fine crustacean and milk extract powders and liver and digestive tract extracts for example, can all be exploited, but there are thousands of choices. You bait substances through carp filter feeding can induce a feeding frenzy state even before your carp have even swallowed a single bait!
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!
Smaller food items can naturally be passed to the throat teeth in mouthfuls without any problem and of course the more energy efficient the food delivery system is the better. It can often be the case that small baits are the preferred choice of more experienced big fish anglers because they can see the benefits of smaller food items in regards how fish feed on such baits and also their more natural weight, size and movement in water when combined with a correctly balanced hook rig. I find boilies in the 6 to 8 millimetre size excellent for bigger more wary fish even with huge mouths!
If you exploit the various filter feeding modes of fish using various grades of ingredients both soluble and insoluble in your ground baits you can certainly induce far more intense and suitable feeding for hooking wary big carp. You might recall the fact that fish are lateral lines are tuned to sense the movements of live foods like maggots and sound is important in ground bait effectiveness, but smaller hook baits are well recommended in conjunction with this. With carp one thing is for sure and that is when you leverage their mode of feeding or preferably specifically induce particular modes of intense feeding, you can vastly improve your catches all year round and especially in winter and high summer and all you need to know is a bit more about effective bait use and ingredients manipulation...
By Tim Richardson.
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