The Genealogy of Fishing Lures: Darwin’s Finches and Fishhooks.
While there are tens of thousands of fishing lures on the market today, they almost all have many fewer common ancestors, much like the fish species, they are designed to catch. The genealogy of fishing lures can be traced back to a comparatively small number of precursors, which were successful designs that persisted over time. Plugs, spoons, and spinners constituted 90% of the content of my father’s single tackle box, and he was both a knowledgeable and avid angler some 60 to 80 or more years ago. Of course, at the time, he fished mainly with live bait on the St. Lawrence River, specializing in perch, walleye, smallmouth bass, pike and musky, using a classic technique that would be identified as the double-hook “drop-shot” method today. We called it the “perch-rig” back then, although it was equally effective for walleye and reef-dwelling smallmouth. But there were other days when the old man would eschew live bait, opting to troll Heddon vamps for big walleye or musky, or cast both deep and shallow running river runts for feisty smallmouths.
Some of the first innovators in lure designs had to be fly fishers, who practiced their craft centuries ago in Europe, bringing their time-honored heritage to new waters in a new world. Fly boxes with a handful of legendary patterns and styles for trout and salmon became populated in my time with all kinds of fur and feather inventions, targeted at almost everything that swims in fresh and more recently, saltwater.
The modern revolution in fishing lure and tackle design occurred across every genre of sport fishing in fresh and salt water around the world. In a time of increasing wealth and new information networks, recreational fishing was redefined into fishing sub-cultures focused on species or techniques and became more craft-worthy than utilitarian. It happened in my part of the world with the arrival of the balsa minnow created by Rapala, but the same phenomena were occurring elsewhere with other new lure and tackle designs in everything from fly tying to down-rigging for trout and salmon and deep sea fishing. I also learned the much older, saltwater-derived art of jigging at a northern fly-in fishing camp, which was brought back to the walleye in my native St. Lawrence River to astounding effect.
While many infamous lures had their roots in my father’s time, few matched the fish catching performance of the delicate, side to side action and finesse-flash appearance captured in the Rapala minnow. Startling new lure designs along with existing crankbaits, basic jigs, spoons, spinners, and new plastics for worms and jig furnishings, and other lures at the time became the springboard for growth in the modern fishing tackle industry.
At this point in fishing lure genealogy, a remarkable proliferation of lures took place from the ancestral stock. The diversification of lures and tackle was so great that it mirrors the phenomenon of adaptive radiation; a blossoming of diversity from comparatively few antecedents, similar to what Charles Darwin first observed in finches on the Galapagos Islands. He reported these findings in his 1859 publication “On the Origin of Species.”6 What appears to have happened is that wayward finches were blown off the western South American continent and somehow made landfall on the semi-tropical archipelago in the Pacific Ocean called the Galapagos Islands. Here they bred and were augmented perhaps by new arrivals over time. The original stock of finches was fortunate to find a niche similar to the one they left, but as numbers of finches grew, so did competition among them in the original niche. Nature’s solution was to gradually evolve different feeding adaptations among the finches, which diversified the original niche and lowered the competition for food and other resources among them. Altogether, at least 14 new species were derived from the one common ancestor, all slightly different but maintaining visible evidence of the ancestral stock.
The adaptive history of Darwin’s finches is analogous to the proliferation of new fishing lures each designed to exploit a different niche in the fishing tackle market. Like Darwin’s finches, the phenomenon is driven by competition. Following the introduction of a lure that sets an unusually successful precedent, all kinds of variations and knock-off varieties of the same bait or tackle are produced to meet a specific need and business opportunity.
Often a new lure is released in a limited number of colors and functional capabilities until the market responds. Once a good response occurs, subsequent generations of the lure are produced in a wider range of colors, actions, sizes, and other capabilities. So fishing lures from the original bait-casters plugs were “reinvented” into the basic Rapala minnow, and these, like lost finches radiated out into multi-colored floaters, sinkers, shad-raps, fat-raps, X-raps and so on. As markets expanded, many new companies got into the game. Subsequent lure generations expanded outwardly with new functionality and specialty uses or niches as top-water, shallow-water, mid-depth, suspending or deep diving minnow-imitators and crankbaits.
The advice for an angler selecting lures is to follow nature’s lead and let the intended function of the lure be your guide to selection. Anglers can then approach the lure counters and racks with a clear idea of what they need their new acquisitions to do and what they should look like before making any choices. The more information you can bring to the selection process, the better the result will be.
Anglers should also note that any specific lure advice I may give is tempered by my North American experience mainly in freshwater. The principles of lure selection and use in fresh and saltwater are the same, although saltwater denizens can range from diminutive baitfish to gigantic predators.
Breaking lure choices down to the target species and unique fishing circumstances you will face on the water is the first step. Under the right conditions, most lures have applications across many seasons, but it is useful to build your collection with specific uses and seasons in mind. For example, minnow-imitating crankbaits can be trolled or cast in the shallower water used by spring walleye. As the fish move deeper, diving crankbaits may replace floaters, and eventually, deep-billed minnow-imitators may be needed to bump bottom at depth with the heavy river current. Your choices for meeting walleye trolling requirements should follow seasons and applications, so each time you visit the bait counter, you are looking for a tool with a function in mind.
At the same time, favorite local lures garnered from common knowledge may fit the unique circumstances posed by uncertainties, such as water clarity or color in a given waterbody. I have always found it useful to gather local lure lore and to invest nominally in the more likely patterns. If your intended quarry is bass, the same seasonal match-ups are required, in both hard and soft baits. Walleye jigging similarly moves through seasons, depths, and behavioral patterns like vertical jigging over deep water structure or trolling for suspended fish in open water.
Almost all species from gamefish to panfish exhibit seasonally-dependent feeding habits, so knowing what the fish are feeding on and how it changes is also a useful general guide to lure selection. Matching the hatch makes intuitive sense, and it is a good starting point, but anglers should be aware that the most valuable fishing information in this infamous guide to lure selection, often turns out to be the circumstances under which the quarry is located and captured. At times, matching the hatch is a critical link to fishing success, while at others, it can be a barrier to innovation. Fish get caught on stuff that might even dismay Mother Nature.
To make the most efficient use of your fishing lure budget, I would suggest populating your collection with average-sized fish-getters, supported with a limited selection of small to oversize baits. For our standard freshwater gamefish like bass, walleye and most pike south of the great white north gator havens, fish choose 2 to 4-inch lures on average, with the 2.5 to 3.75-inch crankbaits the most popular in the multi-species range. It is amazing how much difference an inch can make in the apparent size of a crankbait (and in a fish!).
Three to four-inch jig tails or furnishings are also the most commonly used for most species, except soft plastics for bass ranging between 4 and 8 inches in length. Larger fish do seem to prefer slightly larger lures at times, which for crankbaits move up into the 4 to 5-inch range, so for the St. Lawrence and other large river fish, trying bigger lures may increase the chances of catching a trophy. Exceptionally-sized fish like ten lb+ walleye, musky and gator-rated northern pike have a definite preference for much larger live or dead prey and their imitations. The prey size preferences of trophy gamefish have been demonstrated in studies, but the trade-off with using larger lures or live bait is catching fewer of the smaller fish, (noting that 2 to 3 lb. walleye or bass are rather nice to catch).
Lure shape and color are the variables that instill addictive behavior in the beholder. On top of reams of advice from manufacturers, pro-anglers, and the fishing media; we all have our personal experiences and perceptions on what works. Lure choices get made by individuals with their vested fish-catching interests in mind. Sort of like Adam Smith’s description of how the wealth of nations is created by individuals acting in their self-interest. He called it a free market economy guided by an “invisible hand.”7
adaptiveangler.com 