As I was throwing bits of bread to 20 sunfish in my pond, watching them knock heads on the surface going after them, one thing occurred to me: fish have instincts when it comes to what is edible (or not) even if they've never seen something like bread or an earthworm in their lifetime.

The same thing goes for eight small turtles that come near from different directions once they hear the surface splashes made by the sunfish. Bread is not part of their diet but they fight each other for bits of bread as do sunfish that race in to grab the bread from their mouths in shallow water.

Today I cast a Floating Rapala to test a rod/reel combo and sure enough it was attacked by sunfish on the surface over eight FOW. I didn't want to catch them and yanked the lure away, but on the next cast a crappie got hooked in the same spot.

I thought: a Rapala's action resembles no swimming action of a fish when retrieved steadily. It waddles causing two sets of trebles to click on their split rings. Instinct didn't alert them that the object was not edible so why the strikes?

Possible answere? A fish's senses are finely tuned to what moves around in their imediate proximity - alive or manmade. If something is alive or not, as in the case of bread bits, instinct decides if the object is worth eating.

If the feeding instinct doesn't kick in, something else provokes a fish to attack starting with its supersensitive senses (visual and vibrational), leading to a - who's the boss now?! - bully attack. Could be curiousity, could be a lure-induced irritation - like when we slap at a biting insects that pricks our skin multiple times.

Various Lures are chosen for different reasons - simulation not one of them. Bread and earthworms are instinctually sensed as edible whereas lures are not put into that category. I believe lures are attacked simply because predators can be bullies too!