Understanding How Bass Hunt Forage

Bass use their six senses to identify forage, capture forage, and confirm whether it is suitable for consumption or should be spit out. In other words, bass use their vision, lateral lines (feel vibrations), sense of smell, hearing, taste and mouth feel to hunt forage.

Why is Understanding How Bass Hunt Important?

It is important to understand how bass hunt to:

  • Select the Best Lure: Bass use different senses to hunt based on visibility (lure visibility). When visibility is high, bass primarily use vision with some assistance in identifying potential forage with the use of their lateral lines. When visibility is low, bass rely on lateral lines (feel vibrations) much more plus their sense of smell, hearing, and taste to identify forage. As such, part of lure selection is to take into consideration what senses bass are using to identify forage. 
  • Compel a Strike: When fishing slow bass may investigate the lure based on their sense of smell and quickly suck it into their mouth to check taste and mouth feel, which can impact lure choice and potentially a decision to add scent/taste to the lure. Lure scent ,taste and texture also can impact the time available for a hook set. 
Understand How Bass Hunt Forage
  • Identify Forage:
    • Vision: Functions as the primary sense in high lure visibility situations to identify and capture forage.
    • Lateral Line: Functioning as the primary sense in low lure visibility situations, comprises a row of pores filled with water and nerve endings on both sides of the bass. The lateral lines detect small water displacements (“pressure waves”) to help identify and capture forage.
    • Sense of Smell (Olfaction): Serves as a secondary sense which alerts bass to forage over long distances with limited directional information.
    • Hearing: A secondary sense that enables bass to detect sound waves to identify potential forage, threats like predators, and unknown commotions.
       
  • Capture Forage:
    • Vision and Lateral Line: Used together to pinpoint forage relying more on their lateral line as lure visibility decreases. Blind bass can survive with the use of lateral line.
  • Forage Confirmation:
    • Olfaction (Sense of Smell): Just before potentially capturing the forage, bass often test the odor to ensure its consistency with known forage. 
    • Taste: A contact sense where the bass uses taste buds to test the potential forage prior to a consumption decision and if it doesn’t taste like forage the bass spits the object out.
    • Mouth Feel: A contact sense in the bass’ mouth, in humans called mouthfeel, where the bass feels the texture of the potential forage prior to a consumption decision and if it doesn’t feel like forage the bass spits the object out.
Additional Considerations
  • Understanding Bass Bites: Bass Bites involve the process of capturing potential forage, either spitting it out, moving it, or consuming it.  Motivation includes: reaction bites, defensive bites, ambush bites, investigation bites, competitive and territorial bites. Capture techniques include: hitting the forage hard, mouth vacuum to suck in the forage, nibble to capture a piece of the forage and grab and swim off with the forage. 
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