Making sense of scents: Do they really help you catch more fish?

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Do fish scents work? Should we apply them to our lures to catch more and bigger walleye, bass, trout, northern pike and muskies? That’s the question we posed on our recent Doc Talks Fishing podcast to Dr. Bruce Tufts, who is a comparative fish physiologist at Queen’s University.

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“Because we breathe air and live in an environment with air, we don’t always understand how things work in the water,” says Tufts, who specializes in fish olfactory senses. “Fish smell and taste. The system works a little bit differently because they’re in water, but their effectiveness and sensitivity is something that would surprise a lot of people. Their ability to discriminate between different odours, smells and tastes is very good.”

When we mention to Tufts that various studies we’ve read have documented that a fish’s sense of smell is the equivalent to us going into the Amazon rainforest and listening to songbirds, he agrees, saying they even use their senses of smell, taste and odour “to detect predators, prey and communicate with each other. The problem is we live in two vastly different worlds and we don’t realize that fish are constantly smelling and tasting.”

One of the things that Tufts chuckles about when we bring it up is that anglers often fret about getting gasoline and oil on their hands and lures.  But unless a substance is water soluble—which oil isn’t—fish can’t detect it.

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“It is absolutely true,” he says. “At the beginning of our conversation, I talked about the boom back in the 1980s of various products for anglers to use as attractants for fish. A number of them were oil based. And one of the misconceptions is that they would actually stimulate fish in a positive way. But in fact, fish couldn’t even know what they were. Anything that’s oil-based wouldn’t be available to the receptors that they use to determine what’s there in terms of smell and taste.”

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Not surprisingly, the folks at American Bait Works contacted Tufts and asked if he and his research team at Queen’s University, would design a product for them that he could prove—scientifically—was effective.

“We came up with a lot of candidate molecules that might stimulate fish receptors based on what we know about other fish species and other animals,” says Tufts. “I have hundreds of fish in the basement of this building, where I have run a lab for many years, and we set up feeding trials.

“We had individual fish in chambers and started the process of working through what we thought were good candidate compounds to stimulate fish in a positive way through smell and taste. It took a lot of work, until we narrowed down through hundreds and hundreds of experiments, compounds that worked and compounds that didn’t work. One of the things that people may not realize is that a scent isn’t just one molecule or one compound, but it’s a mixture of things that work together to create a positive stimulus. You might think this molecule is important and maybe this one over here is, too. But then you have to figure out what is the right concentration. So we tried different molecules, different compounds and different concentrations.

“You end up with hundreds and hundreds of experiments to create something that works together to get fish to think that they’re actually tasting or smelling something that would be their real prey. When, in fact, we’re picking the key molecules that they would be tracking down in the environment, that would tell them that that’s what they were smelling or tasting.”

Without giving away too many secrets —you’ll have to listen to the podcast for those details —Tufts and his research team came up with BAITFUEL that is, well, scientifically proven to attract and trigger fish to bite.

“I think what shocked me the most was that you set up a number of individuals to do your experiments and you watch their reaction to what we call the control or placebo that’s got nothing in it. And then you watch the reaction compared to the thing that you think should give a positive stimulus in the food.  It’s so consistent that it doesn’t take very long and your jaw just drops and you go, wow.”

You can listen to the entire fascinating subject about fish olfactory senses —and how Tufts and his research team answered every question you’ve ever wondered about fish scents— by tuning into Doc Talks Fishing on your favourite podcast provider.  Or simply click on the link below and enjoy.