Alrighty, I might get flocked by the bait industries for this, but, hey..all is fair in love and free info. From basic to more compound advancement. Remember, these ingredients were and still are in used by quite a bit of bait makers, pellet manufacturers, and of course, the DYI bodies:
* Liver Powder/Paste: not just good in French sandwiches, but also attract the living daylight out of the fishes. When an injured fish of small sizes bleed, guess what, the hormone secret the fight or flight released by the liver get pumped through the blood. Big fishes smell, follow, and gobble gobble.
* Ground anchovy/krill (whole and dried), krill meal, and small dried shrimp meal: Necessity starts from the smaller creatures. You guys feed them baitfish ground, such as freshwater shads and minnows. Great. But do you know that freshwater fish has a higher affinity to saltwater creatures? Why do you think bait company and pellet manufacturer load salty content as part of the ingredients?
* SALT: too much, not good..stick creatures from the salt like the ones above. 1 cup of olive oil soaked in ground anchovy OR ground krill/shrimp, with 3tbspns of garlic, will yield a potent attractant that will lure the most stubborn fish out of hidden during warm seasons.
* Fresh ground kelp, or in this case, kelp powder: yep..not only it contain macro and micro nutrients that the fish looks for, but also it contain various trace of attractant, such as betaine. Some company over process the kelp during powderizing phases that it caused the original kelp to lose most of the nutrients and attraction ability. I normally go to the Asian store, grab a nice bag of dried kelp leaves,go home, put in the juice extractor machine or a very powerful blender, and ground the living daylight out of the dried leaves. You can incorporate the rehydrated version of the leaves into the ground moist foods for your fish during pellet making.
Now, for a bit more complex compounds:
Shell fish extracts: normally in form of oil after processing stages. Do not purchase the oils that contains decaying shellfish tissues. The oil will drive away the fish.
Animal tissue extracts: Same as shell fish extracts, which containing amino acids, betaine, inosine, organic acids dimethyl-B-propiothetin and amino nitrogen. I do this through methods of distillation in my garage, and when I can, The Lab. Let's just say the smell can be obnoxious, but the results will be femme fatale attractions to fishes.
Common responding agents to integrate: alkaline and neutral substances such as glycine (the betaine/trimethylglycine), proline, taurine, valine.
Aspartic and glutamic acids: It's found in plants that fish seek out for refuge. It's an auto-reponse compound found in nature that fishes tend to detect, observe, shelter, then forage. If no structure is found, they forage before search for the next shelter point. I also notice that turpenes and turpenoids at low level (derived from an experiment which I use to pine sap to create a non-impaling livebaits approach and local DFG Christmas tree dumped into the water to create habitats) attract fish quite quickly. Fishes will use the structures producing the turpenes and turpenoids within a week.
Amino acids proven to initiate gustatory system response: Proline (Pro), alanine (Ala), leucine (Leu), 2-amino-3-guanidinopropionic acid (Agp), and once again, betaine (Bet). High concentration of these amino acids initiate violent feeding, or feeding frenzy. Extremely high concentration create lockjaw after initial feeding without secondary re-initiation of feeding.
Okay..I'm boring you guys. Have fun deciphering what I just wrote.
