Lure Researcher Carps About Target Fish

For a fish, life with Keith Jones is as good as it gets.

There are first-class accommodations, complete safety, even respect. For this, the fish are asked to do just one thing.

“I’d like them to tell me what they like to eat,” said Jones, a fish biologist at Berkley Inc., which makes fishing lures and equipment.

Over the years, trout, catfish, bass and other fish have eagerly cooperated, and Berkley has packaged the information into lures that help fishermen around the world catch such species.

One fish, though, won’t reveal its secrets: the carp.

“They have outsmarted me. We had to abandon carp and go to goldfish. I don’t want to be demeaning to goldfish, but they’re not very smart,” Jones said.

The problem is, carp learn too quickly, fouling up Jones’ method of determining what things fish like the most.

Some fishermen won’t understand the problem. In many places, carp are considered trash fish and are left to rot on the riverbank. They’re bony, hard to prepare and like to eat the eggs and young of more preferred species.

“They’re not very good eating,” Jones said. “The old story is, the preferred way to prepare a carp is to fillet it and season it to taste, put it on a wooden board, bake it at 350 for an hour and then throw away the fish and eat the board.”

But the bottom-feeder is popular in Europe, where it is considered a challenge to catch, and is gaining converts in the United States, according to John Yancey of Groveland, Ill., president of the Carp Anglers Group.

Berkley, North America’s biggest sport-tackle company, has never marketed a carp lure.

“What we’re trying to do is find exactly what components of food they’re looking for and then exaggerate those components in a bait,” Jones said.

Jones’ method is to soak cotton balls with various flavors. If the flavor is delicious, the fish will swallow. If it’s less than delicious, the fish will chew it up and spit it out. If it’s completely awful, the fish will spit it out right away.

The cotton ball itself is neutral; fish neither like them nor dislike them, and they’re harmless if swallowed.

Trout cooperated.

“We’ve done about 25,000 or 30,000 of those tests. Trust me, that’s a lot of time taking a tweezer and dropping a cotton ball in a tank. Each test is scored. As a result, we’ve got a truly outstanding trout bait,” Jones said.

But carp are too intelligent.

“They quickly learn that some of the cotton pellets have a slightly different look to them. They figure out which ones are going to have the right taste and the wrong taste,” he said.

Some delicious flavors are the same color as flavors that aren’t tasty at all. If the carp is first introduced to the unappetizing sample, it is likely to reject samples that look the same.

“He’ll quickly learn that some cotton pellets are not going to offer the flavor he wants. He won’t even try them, so we can’t tell how much he likes them,” Jones said.

Jones also learned that carp make decisions based on the rate of descent of the taste pellets, then reject those that sink at a certain rate even if the flavor has changed.

Jones’ laboratory has dozens of tanks, the centerpiece being one the size of a swimming pool in which bass live the good life, sampling lures that are pulled through the water by a device that works like the mechanical rabbit at a dog track.

Jones is still interested in carp. But, for now, he’ll try to draw conclusions about them from their more predictable relatives, the goldfish.

“Working with carp is a pain in the neck,” he said.