Toothless Predator. Gudgeon - For Trolling

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

Fishing tales

Once upon a meeting, my constant fishing companion Alexander Rykov said:

- At my work, a guy from the next department boasted that he successfully caught minnows with a spoon and a wobbler.

Of course, like any angler, this fact surprised me very much … Is the gudgeon a predator? This is something new. For the overwhelming number of fishermen, predators, probably excluding the asp, are mainly: toothed - pike, fanged - pike perch, grasping with small teeth - perch, rotan. And then suddenly a gudgeon crept into their ranks! After all, this is a completely seemingly peaceful fish, and suddenly - a hunter. There is clearly something wrong here. And very interested, I asked Rykov to talk to this guy: would he take us with him fishing for minnows.

Consent was obtained. And so the three of us are racing on the "Niva" to a small river in the south of our region.

Oleg, of course, perfectly understood what interests us, so he did not torment him and began to explain while driving:

- When I first caught a gudgeon with a spoon, then, of course, I thought it was pure coincidence. However, when this periodically began to repeat itself, there was no longer any doubt: the minnow grabs the spoon and the wobbler like a real predator.

- How can he grab a spoon, because he has a very small mouth? Rykov asked in surprise.

- His mouth is really quite small, moreover located below, - Oleg confirmed. - And yet the gudgeon takes a spoon, and especially greedily - a mini-wobbler; sometimes throws himself on a bait almost as large as himself.

This statement looked absolutely absurd, which is probably why further the conversation in the car did not stick.

Soon we turned off the highway onto a country road, drove another two kilometers, then stopped, and Oleg said:

- Then we will walk to the place. It's not far, five hundred meters.

And so we found ourselves on the bank of a narrow river, I would even say - a stream. Directly in front of us was a small but very talkative waterfall. Water, falling from its tiny ledge, was divided into jets, which, bending around a large stone sticking out of the water, after twenty meters again combined into a single stream.

- We need a little lower, - said Oleg, and we headed left.

About ten minutes later, when we climbed a small slope that sloped down to the water, our guide stopped, put the tackle on the grass, went to the edge of the cliff and suggested:

- Look to the left: you see there, on the light sandy bottom, you can see the little blocks. These are minnows.

I began to peer and saw several fish standing with their heads upstream. Of course, water increases objects one and a half times, but I think there was not a single fish more than 10 centimeters among the minnows. Some lay motionless, their belly pressed against the bottom, others scurried around them and on the roll.

Having unwound the tackle, Oleg approached the water and, not at all hiding, threw a mini-wobbler with a spinning rod against the current, three meters higher than the place where the minnows were. The first wiring was empty, the second, the fifth, the tenth - too. The impression was that the fish were not at all interested in the bait that swam past them. Finally, after another attempt, Oleg pulled the gudgeon out of the water.

After that, there were no bites for a long time. And this despite the fact that the angler, in search of minnows, changed many places and several lures. Only half an hour later he fished out the next gudgeon. But Rykov and I were enough to be convinced that minnows really bite on wobblers and spinners.

… When I told a familiar ichthyologist about the predator gudgeon, he, after listening to me, concluded:

- It is quite possible that the fish sees competitors in the wobbler and the spoon on its site, and therefore tries to drive them away.

- And here the site: after all, the gudgeon is a schooling fish … - I objected.

“And these turned out to be individualists,” the ichthyologist retorted my argument.

Sometimes it happened to me that they took rudd, roach and even bream for bait or live bait, but for a gudgeon … It's just amazing! It turns out that nature has presented another riddle, to which there is no answer.