This may go down in history as one of the dumber posts...but here goes.
I have two larger ponds with bluegill populations. One pond has 260 BG, all males. The other pond has 125 BG, either sex, with a young-of-the-year population mixed in. We watch these fish with an Aquavue camera ocassionally. It seems like these bluegill have two feeding modes. One is "attack first, ask questions later", the other is "inspect, then ingest or reject". I've seen both modes in action many times. The bluegill in the all male pond always "inspect and reject". The bluegill in the mixed pond use the "attack mode" most often, I'm surmising because they will get their butts whooped by the young of the year fish if they don't. Consequently the pond with 260 adult fish is, ironically, a lot harder to catch fish in than the pond with 125 fish.
I can imagine a scenario where a largemouth bass that lives in a world where feed is a little more scarce, and gets his tail kicked ten or twelve times in a row would go into the attack mode out of necessity. If you accept the notion that all artificial lures look a little fake, this bass wouldn't have time to make a differentiation and ends up getting caught. The largemouth who has regular access to pellets and a little less competition for food can make his brief inspection and probably, more often than not reject the offering.
