Elusive individuals...

[Gurn]

I have a theory that I'd like to throw into the ring..I would suggest that a minority of carp have more predatory instincts than others with fish and insects being the bulk of their diet and rarely touching anglers baits. We know that chub are predatory...I've even caught bream on a chunk of mackerel!
I remember seeing a pair of Tiddenfoot commons corraling fry into the margins and charging into them to feed. I recall a friend catching an unknown (common)carp on a sprat with two treble hooks in it, intended for pike. Just last week my work colleague caught two commons on livebaits intended for perch. Just how many times have we heard of that uncaught big common in our lakes, seen but never caught.

[Dave Burr]

Good call Gurn. I mentioned in the 'Favourite Bait' thread that all of our UK fish seem to eat flesh at times and carp along with bream will eat copious amounts of fry. I fished a 2 acre lake that contained just carp, a few bream and some sticklebacks. the margins were full of fry yet you never caught a home grown fish, they never grew beyond the mouthful stage.

But I do find it difficult to accept that some fish will never wean onto free bait and ultimately the odd one with a hook in it. I cannot get my head around fish being that discerning. But then, who knows and that makes it more interesting.

[Shaun Harrison]

It was one of the Longfield Commons Shaun, it went to be tested, at Brampton Labs. I took it alive there myself.

I found it very strange that it was neither male or female!

Thought it was probably one of the Staines/Longfield/Fox Pool fish:Thumb:

[Shaun Harrison]

Its not just carp. I used to fish a pool of about 1.5 acres that, although established, had been open for several years to anglers. Somebody put a fish finder over it one day and found an enormous shoal fish that were presumed to be bream yet none had ever been caught. The next year they started to figure in catches - obviously knowing that their little game of hide and seek was over.

Back in my days on the Mangrove I landed a double figure bream albeit by accident on the carp rods. It was a proper black ancient looking old specimen.

The following year another was caught of a similar size and we presumed it was probably the last remaining survivor of some long gone shoal. A couple more years passed and no more captures.

The year I left the syndicate it had been decided to do a netting of the place to remove some of the millions of rudd that were becoming very stunted in there and guess what turned up - loads of double figure bream!

The Mangrove was very exclusive and each member very carefully vetted before they even made it as far as the waiting list. Those anglers had all been around a long while and were more than capable of putting fish on the bank yet those bream evaded us. Myself I fished for 7 years or so with very small and very soft baits which is my normal way. Baits that I would target bream with, yet they evaded us and didn't even used to show in what was a relatively shallow silty mere.

Some fish go totally against the grain of what we think we have learned about them.

[Shaun Harrison]

I don't think there's any mystery at all. If you flip a coin, say a dozen times, and repeat that trial until you lose interest, a few trials you'll get a lot of heads, a few you'll get a lot of tails, but mostly a mix. Similarly a proportion of fish will be caught a lot, some not at all, others now and again. Rules of chance.

I could point you to quite a few carp that simply aren't bait eaters. Similarly during my years on Patshull Church Pool we had a horrendous issue with eels which had actually been stocked would you believe?

During the summer months you couldn't keep 2 rods fishing with boiled paste baits due to the eels so we were forced to particle fish to give the carp a chance of actually getting to eat a bit of bait. come the start of winter and we were able to get away with using paste and boiled paste as the eels migrated under the boat house and very much left us alone. Very strange how they used to gather into one massive ball but that is another story.

Now like most carp waters which have been fished for years you get to know a fair few of the older fish and a very interesting thing started to materialise in as much as some of the fish which were frequent visitors to the bank on the particle baits didn't turn up on the larger baits and some of those that came out on the boiled paste baits each winter never showed in the summer on the particle baits.

Just like us, some love vegetables and some simply enjoy them whilst there will be others that don't touch them.

[Skeff]

Wow! This took off rather unexpectedly... Some really interesting thoughts and opinions.

Some of my own observations:

1. I agree with Gurn that a significant number of the harder to catch fish are predatory. I've watched them several times on Ashmead, hunting rudd like a shoal of perch, driving them up against the margins and then eating them as they break back over their heads. I don't think the carp i'm talking about here though are in this category. In ashmead it's very noticeable that the commons are dramatically outstripping the mirrors for growth. Commons and mirrors from the same age class are putting on an average of alb and alb per year respectively. I think this is because the mirrors are competing with everything else (including the rudd) for invertebrates, whereas the commons are taking a short cut and eating the rudd.

2. I disagree with Firebird (sorry!!) in that some of the patterns emerging at Ashmead over the decades are far too specific to be down to chance alone, although I do agree of course that chance will play a huge part. For instance:
- There is a common carp that only gets caught once a year in most years. Every capture has been in the last week of February and from precisely the same spot (to within a foot!). This has happened in six consecutive years...... It could be chance but I suspect a pattern of behaviour linked to dietary requirement is more likely.
- Some carp are caught very regularly (several times a year) and from all over the fishery. In line with Shaun's view, these carp obviously recognise and use bait as a food source. I'm sure that sometimes the most regularly caught fish use bait because of old damage. A good example is out second biggest mirror which suffered horrendous mouth damage because of an otter when it was a twenty pounder. It never recovered and I'm sure it eats bait as it is easy to pick up compared to filtering silt for invertebrates with the mouth in it's damaged form and also because it has lost sensitivity.
- Some carp go several years (longest is eleven that I know of) without capture and then et caught in an obscure part of the Ashmead labyrinth, after which they get caught several times in the course of a few weeks all over the fishery, before disappearing once more. I think these fish maintain and dominate an area and are disrupted by the capture and then susceptible to angling until they find and dominate a new location.

3. Overall, my feeling is that the seldom caught fish are mainly filter feeding for invertebrates and so not susceptible to an angler's bait. they don't grow very large as a result, compared to their peers, which benefit from the angler's baits and more nutritious, larger food items.

Another theory I now hold, (which prompted my post) is that these fish are males that have matured sexually and then stopped growing so they are only feeding on invertebrates and feeding less overall as they are on a maintenance diet rather than on a growth diet. I know some males do get very large (44+ in Ashmead) but I believe increasingly that there are different life strategies at work here driven by genetic and environmental interaction. The analogy I'm thinking of is in salmon where you get some very large cock fish but equally you get early maturation and cessation of growth in precocious par.....

Truth is we'll probably never know and it's just one of angling's wonderful mysteries... But speculation is fun!

[Danny Boy]

great thread ,I have enjoyed reading everyone thoughts on the how and why and maybe.
this topic will always be a mystery and I don't think will ever know the real answer to it.
all I will say is "don't it drive you mad when you see a big fish that just doesn't want anything to do with your bait"

[Carp Artist]

I used to fish a small farm pond in Devon of less than an acre , often I use to catch a fast growing mirror which would gain approximately 4lb per season. It soon reached 20 lbs and became very elusive. Not only was it never caught, but it was never seen. The last time it graced my net it weighed just over 21 1/2lbs .................Five years later I caught it float fishing, at close to thirty. Somehow it had remained unseen and uncaught . It does make you think?

[Dave Burr]

Chance may come into a fish's capture when there is competition for food and it is down to which one grabs the bait first but, I think that that's about as far as it goes. I have observed fish behaviour and know many that have done so more effectively and for longer periods than I. They will tell of individual fish behaviour - personality if you like -, social structure and many other traits that can affect a fish's likelihood of being caught.

One example that I've quoted before. 'Blackie' was a large barbel that had one eye which made it very susceptible and easy to catch. It was shadowed by two other, larger fish that would not grace the bank from one year to the next because they would use Blackie as the stooge and watch her feed. If she fed and all was safe then they'd tuck in, eventually. If Blackie spiralled up in the water they would melt away and meet up with her again later. Once fish pick up this strategy they become very hard to catch, big old chub are past masters at sitting back and watching the smaller shoal members.

Obviously some of the 'impossible' carp are loners or swim in a small but exclusive group. I'd love the opportunity to spend time studying fish like that but my venue does not really lend itself to such observation.

[Skeff]

Well, I'm sure you're right, but one does not necessarily need to impute personal characteristics to carp to explain that some are caught often, others rarely. Simple probability explains that. If on the other hand it is possible to know and identify every fish in the water, one might over time be able to draw such inferences.

I think that's the point Firebird - Whilst I agree that chance and probability plays a massive part in al this, the thing is that I'm talking about fish which are all individually identifiable and can be watched a great deal of the time. The type of scenario I have in mind is too common and too specific to be purely down to chance and must in my view have some behavioural interaction behind it....

Another example from my lake would be the contesting feeding styles of say a fish known as The Grey and Single Scale, the biggest mirror. The Grey will feed on a spot four ages, seldom leaving it and often returning to feed there again if does.... In contrast, Single will dive into the base of the reeds and feed intently for a few seconds before swimming off and repeating the action - so a much more mobile and seemingly random feeding pattern that makes her far harder to catch...

So individual differences in behaviour also play a part in my view.

As I said in my last post however, I now feel that overall life strategy also plays a major part, with some males maturing young and relatively small and then only eating enough to maintain condition, rather than grow further. This means they eat less and are more likely tone sustained by a purely invertebrate diet, making them harder to catch.... Possible? I think so. The salmon analogy does give an example of a fish species where this happens....