What My Dog Taught Me About Big Striped Bass – On The Water
I’ve had my dog, Prince, for about six years. When he was a puppy and then a “teenager,” his behavior often surprised me. When I let him off the leash in my local park, he would run off in every direction. I’d chase him down, and sometimes he’d come—sometimes he wouldn’t. It was a mess and got so bad that I almost stopped taking him there.
As Prince has gotten older, he moves around when off-leash, but now stays within a certain area and comes to me if I call him. He has other habits that, over time, have become much more clearly defined and predictable. When my wife leaves, he has to go to the window. When a family member enters the house, he has to have something in his mouth to greet them. He will lie on top of me in bed at night, but next to me in the daytime.
It struck me that this change in behavior patterns over a lifespan is true for striped bass as well. It’s not absolute, though. Younger bass are predictable to a certain extent and older bass can be unpredictable. Still, I think the general assumption is correct and it got me thinking about what I’ve learned about neuroanatomy.
I’ve known that behavioral changes occur when there is a strong enough feedback loop between a behavior and the neural pathways in the brain that signal the body to perform that behavior. As a specific behavior is repeated over time, more feedback is sent back to the brain and those neural pathways become more dominant, meaning that behavior becomes more likely.
I’m a psychotherapist, and patients often ask me how they can change their negative thoughts. My answer is straightforward and simple. To change a habit of mind, one needs to notice a particular thought and then think something different. Whenever we think about something, that thought follows a specific neural pathway. As use of a neural pathway increases, the more strengthened and efficient it becomes. Essentially, what might have been a local street in neurological terms becomes an inviting four-lane highway. Bolstering of neural pathways that are used frequently is called a process of neural natural selection and the opposite is true as well. The less we think a particular thought, the weaker those neural connections become, and the myelin sheath that acts like insulation over a wire becomes thinner.
Striped bass don’t think as such, but instead are tuned to act in their environment through a set of innate inclinations that preferentially prioritize some behaviors and environmental conditions over others. These innate biases shape behavior to maximize survival and inform when, where, and how they feed. Think of them not as precise instructions, but rather as an internal set of values that “weights” experience, inclining action in one direction and inhibiting it in others. Many innate biases are common knowledge among fishers: striped bass prefer breaks in current and edges of current; they prefer to ambush prey and use big water to do so; they will eat during the day but prefer nocturnal conditions.
What my dog taught me was that older bass become more predictable, more precisely regulated in the expression of their internal preferences than younger striped bass. Years of repeating some behaviors more often than other have strengthened the underlying neuroanatomy that how supports older and bigger bass behave. The innate values for those behaviors becomes more heavily weighted, leading to their more frequent and consistent expression. The opposite happens as well, with other behaviors undertaken less often or random actions weakening or dropping out altogether.
We often think of older, big striped bass as lazy and smart. While true to an extent, it’s also a projection of human attributes onto stripers that leads to an imprecise understanding of what make them tick. Instead, I think of huge old bass as highly efficient in seeking the best feeding opportunities that expend the least calories. What we are describing when we think of striped bass as smart and lazy is the end result of innate biases over time becoming more strictly regulated, intensified, and dominant by the behavior-neural pathway feedback loop.
Trophy hunters who pursue huge striped bass and come to learn their behavioral traits often comment that big bass act like an entirely different species. Years of a feedback loop shaping and focusing their behavior one small quantitative step at a time, leads to a qualitative difference (something I actually see with Prince as well). Older, big bass may feed in very narrow tide/current windows, so that there are many times you can catch teen or 20-pound bass and then the bite dies off. At that point, most anglers leave, but that is exactly when a trophy hunter wants to fish, knowing that as the tide has slacked out, large bass may briefly feed. Older, large bass seem to prefer current, but confine themselves to only the smallest areas with optimal current breaks. They don’t seem to travel in large schools. They typically won’t chase after baits that aren’t right in front of them.
Old, giant bass are predictable, but how they behave is different and it takes time to understand the when, where, and what of their behavior. Their high level of predictability may be comforting since it lets you figure out and reliably fish a pattern or bite window, but that predictability is never 100%. Nature is always complex, leading to variation and uncertainty that at times is humbling, but also is what makes fishing continually challenging.
