I know this topic has been brought up before, but this a new twist: As some of you know I raise a good number of pellet fed bass in a pond that I get to about 3 lbs. for taxidermy schools, and the larger ones predominantly for individual taxidermists for their show rooms and competitions.

I used to be able to walk out on the pier and just drop a piece of crawler in front of the nose of any fish that I had selected and catch it. No more! If I walk out on the pier even at feeding time with a fishing pole in my hand they disappear! All 200 hundred of them! If I come back without the pole they slowly reappear! Additionally if anyone else goes out onto the pier, or with me, they also do the vanishing act. Water is quite clear and they can see me I'm sure.

Who said fish are stupid?

Thank goodness I will have my shocker apparatus operational in the future. It will be well worth it!

That's fascinating. Can you rig your shocker to stay in the water at all times, then give the fish a small shock any time they swim away from you? Eventually they'd follow you right into your house.

Dr. Frankenbruce conditioning at its best.

Not a problem! But I need to train them to fly first! First things first my boy.

Not me, Cecil. I believe your story completely. LMB in my ponds learned a long time ago to follow me around the pond banks while I was fly fishing for BG. They wait for the released BG to grab it for dinner. They have even figured out to not take the hooked BG but to wait for the released one that is sure to come....learning or conditioning or whatever, certainly not stupid.

Cecil, have you ever tested their eyes with a stick or something that looks similar to a pole?

When I walk out on my dock to fish the sound draws just a few small BG. When I walk out the dock with my bright yellow feed bucket, tons of all sizes come right to the top. Maybe I should get a t-shirt with a feed bucket printed on it for when I fish!

Cecil I have contemplated your problem and come up with a fine solution. Recently I had an encounter with cape buffalo in south Texas. Instead of retreating like your bass are doing they immediatly charged the jeep we were in. You and Bruce should get together and raise hybrid bass buffalo.

Ryan,

I'll bet that will only work so long! I think we have grossly underestimated animals. Did anyone see this?

Songbirds can learn basic grammar

Washington — The simplest grammar, long thought to be one of the skills that separate man from beast, can be taught to a common songbird, new research suggests.

Starlings learned to differentiate between a regular birdsong “sentence” and one containing a clause or another sentence of warbling, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature. It took University of California at San Diego psychology researcher Tim Gentner a month and about 15,000 training attempts, with food as a reward, to get the birds to recognize the most basic of grammar in their own bird language.



What the experiment shows is that language and animal cognition is a lot more complicated than scientists once thought and that there is no “single magic bullet” that separates man from beast, said Jeffrey Elman, a professor of cognitive science at UCSD, who was not part of the Gentner research team.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/serv...ry/Science/home

Nope I'm a fish fanatic and I think Bruce is too. Thanks for the suggestion though.