BassBlaster

Why Letting One Go Kills the Bite

You know: You’re on a school, catch one or two, throw ’em back, and the bite dies. Not a secret. But why? No one knows – til now. And it all boils down to…scary stuff.

Seriously.

Excerpts from a recent NY Times article:

> In the 1930s, Karl von Frisch…theorized that injured fish release a substance that is transmitted by smell and causes alarm. But Dr. von Frisch never identified the chemical composition…. He just called it schreckstoff, or “scary stuff.”

> Now researchers may have solved a piece of it.

> Suresh Jesuthasan, a neuroscientist at the Biomedical Sciences Institutes in Singapore, and his colleagues isolated sugar molecules called chondroitins from the outer mucus of zebra fish. They found that when these molecules are broken into fragments, as they might be when the fish’s skin is injured, and added to water, they prompt alarm behavior in other fish.

> At low concentrations, the fish were “mildly perturbed,” Dr. Jesuthasan said. At high concentrations, they stopped darting altogether and froze in place for an hour or longer.

> In a sense, the fish seemed to “smell” the injury.

Okay, I buy all that – seems like another case of science putting a name to the obvious…though maybe not obvious for folks who write the NY Times (zing!).

My question is: Does KVD have these chondroitins? Because he for sure has schreckstoff.

2 Comments

2 Comments

  1. NOLA Mike

    May 30, 2012 at 3:11 pm

    Could you use the chondroitins specific to, say, gizzard shad as attractant?

    • admin (mostly Jay)

      May 30, 2012 at 3:15 pm

      Good thought Mike! Better register that before Berkley cottons on to it….

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