CT,

Just because they are biting soft doesn't necessarily mean they are biting slow. It just means they are not willing to chase. That is when being right on the spot can take fish after fish on slackline and upbite takes, when you get the size and the color right. To me that says they are grazing on forage that cannot or generally does not flee, generally forage than is probably concentrated and not moving much nor capable of it, either.

When we started noticing that much larger bonus fish were not taking the tiny offerings any harder than the crappies, we started to to think that our quarry was actually adjusting intensity of take to what their forage at the time required. Like other predators they are not very likely to put out any more effort than necessary.

For the most part we do not know what will take out crappie offerings next, nor what size it will be until we set the hook, except that it is more likely to be crappies than anything else, since that is what we are targeting.

I fish the soft bite pretty hard, since that is the usual case I find myself fishing to all year around. If a dock holds crappies, it will generally have some sort of soft bite going some place along it pretty much as long as it is installed, with winter spots somewhere close by and very often close to spawning areas, too. We don't take many white crappies up here; they rove more over wider spaces than the blacks. Granted the blacks move around too, but are much more home bodies in areas that have what it takes draw them in the first place, more often moving up and down specific breaklines than moving over wide general areas.