The Mind of the Trout: A Cognitive Ecology for Biologists and Anglers
By Thomas Grubb, Jr. Published by the University of Wisconsin Press; $21.95, softbound.
This is a daunting book. My son-in-law, an avid fly fisher, thumbed through it, tossed it back on the table, and said, “Not for me, thanks!” My guess is that the large majority of anglers will share a similar response. Virtually every page hosts a chart, graph, or table. The captions sometimes fill half a page with 12-cylinder words written in 10-point type.
The Mind of the Trout is a summation of over 200 papers that relate to how trout form thoughts, make decisions, and retain memories. The author, a fly-fishing professor of evolution, ecology, and organismal biology at Ohio State University, is a wonk. In his second paragraph, he writes, “to make this book readable and entertaining to anglers and other amateur biologists, I have reduced scientific jargon to a minimum and mostly steered clear of statistics.” I’ll give him an E for effort, but an F for execution. The is a book riddled with scientific jargon, unnecessarily complex verbiage, and statistics. Lots of statistics. It is clearly aimed at a college-level readership, and these had better be motivated readers. On the flip side, I will give him an A for writing one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve ever read about fish. Grubb begins with an excruciatingly detailed look at trout physiology and anatomy and how the trout garners sensory feedback through polarized vision, an unbelievable sense of smell, subtle vibration detection, and magnetic perception. Trout react to minute changes in water temperature, acidity, salinity, and dissolved oxygen. The first half of the book describes not only what fish perceive, but how they perceive.
The second half of the book builds on the first half and describes how trout gather and process information, then make decisions. To be honest, I never considered that trout make decisions. It seemed to me that fish simply react positively, negatively, or not at all to a stimulus. The author makes it abundantly clear that the lowly fish is constantly not only making decisions, but learning from them, remembering them, and basing future actions on past decisions. This is better than some humans I know. Toward the end of The Mind of the Trout, the author uses a number of studies to postulate why trout are as smart as they are, but not any smarter. It seems that like humans, the trout is motivated by changes in environmental cues. Unlike humans, however, who are short on perception, but long on intelligence, the trout is a veritable battery of exquisitely sensitive receptors. Receptors require very little energy to do their job. The brain, on the other hand, requires 22 times more energy than a similar-sized muscle. An animal that can maximize perception can reduce its need for caloric intake by keeping the hungry brain small. At some evolutionary point, a brain is as large as it needs to be, and anything larger becomes a liability.
I am fascinated by this kind of stuff, but could only wish there was a Cliff Notes version of this book.
Ralph Cutter
What Trout Want: The Educated Trout and Other Myths
By Bob Wyatt. Published by Stackpole Books, 2013; $24.95 hardbound.
What Trout Want: The Educated Trout and Other Myths is the polar opposite of Thomas Grubb’s The Mind of the Trout. The premise of What Trout Want is that trout do not learn and do not modify their behavior based on experience — that the “educated” or “selective” trout is a myth because trout lack the ability to be selective, nor can they learn to avoid flies. Bob Wyatt claims over and over again that highly pressured trout are no more selective, educated, or hard to catch than lightly pressured fish. Using many personal anecdotes, he insists that fish don’t learn to avoid popular flies, but instead are likely turned off by poor presentation or perhaps by anglers who don’t hide well.
Wyatt is a popular fishing writer from the South Island of New Zealand. From what I’ve dredged up online and from the prolific hero shots in his book, the guy is a knowledgeable fly angler. He also knows how to turn a word. Three pages in, I was hooked by his brash, opinionated, take-no-prisoners approach to writing. This guy is certainly no respecter of persons, nor is he in the running for most politically correct writer of the year. In very short order, he names Vincent Marinaro, Ernest Schwiebert, Doug Swisher and Carl Richards, Gary LaFontaine, and just about every other angling author in between and holds them in contempt for their “ridiculous” notions regarding selective trout. My personal experience doesn’t support his theory. Thirtyfive years ago, before the Little Truckee River got famous, you could catch about every trout in it with a size 12 Yellow Humpy on a 3X tippet. Use the same approach now, and it will be a long, slow day on the water. I’d like to believe that my presentations are better now than they were in the 1970s, but that wouldn’t make much difference.
As much as I might disagree with his core philosophy, I completely embrace Wyatt’s tactics and approach to minimalistic fly design. His patterns are brilliant, but haven’t seen the light of day in American fly bins. Unfortunately, though he writes about the philosophy behind his various flies and their construction, only a few are shown in photos. It took Googling on the Web to find his patterns, and a book shouldn’t force you to do that.
What Trout Want is pretty helter-skelter in its structure, and though the chapter titles might lead one to believe that there is a progression from one topic to the next, often, the chapter titles have little relationship to the content. It’s all kind of a blur, but it doesn’t really matter. Wyatt writes like he is having a rambling conversation with the reader, and I found his style not only refreshing, but disarming. He wanders to and fro about everything from fly-line color, to approaching various water types, to thoughts about weather and stream gradients. Very few writers could pull this off, but he does so in admirable fashion. The guy has a lot to teach, and the book delivers a ton of top-notch advice. Unfortunately, it also delivers advice that is completely wrong.
For example, in a subchapter titled “A Sparkling Illusion,” he describes Gary LaFontaine as delusional for his assertion that caddis pupae inflate their cuticles with gas and look like glowing gems rising in the water column. Wyatt categorically states: “ The insect doesn’t pump itself like a miniature balloon. As far as we know, no insect does, and caddisflies are, after all, insects.” After five pages of this, one might tend to believe that he knows what he is talking about. He doesn’t.
Insects do inflate themselves, and everything from terrestrial fruit flies to aquatic mosquito pupae have been exquisitely observed under controlled conditions not only generating interstitial gasses, but moving the gas bubbles around via muscle contractions to separate the pupal cuticle from the adult within. Underwater, I have personally observed caddisflies, mayflies, and midges doing this thousands of times and have many hours of video to prove it.
After reading the book, and despite its failings, I not only ordered a copy for a friend, but also ordered a copy of Wyatt’s other book, Trout Hunting: The Pursuit of Happiness. Someday I’d like to share a beer with this character. I’m sure it would be memorable.
Ralph Cutter
Fly Fishing for Pacific Salmon
By Bruce Ferguson, Les Johnson, and Pat Trotter. Published by Frank Amato Publications, 1985; available on the used-book market, softbound.
Fly Fishing for Pacific Salmon II
By Les Johnson and Bruce Ferguson, with Pat Trotter. Published by Frank Amato Publications, 2008; $39.95 softbound.
Not long after I moved to the Golden State, I found myself on the Smith River fishing the Society Hole, a salmon pool so large you could sink the Taj Mahal in it. Lines were whooshing through the air in a way to remind everyone that long-distance fly casting was invented in California. The king salmon were milling in the deeper part of the hole, but they might as well have been in Kamchatka. I couldn’t get anywhere near them — and what’s more, I no longer cared to try. This wasn’t my kind of angling. I hate crowds, and I hate competitive fishing. Fly fishers in prams were lined up gunwale to gunwale, and the rocky bank overflowed with meat anglers and tangled lines. This wasn’t the contemplative man’s recreation. This was guerilla warfare.
And it was my introduction to California coastal fly fishing for anadromous species. I had done a bit of steelheading previously, on the Deschutes and the North Umpqua in Oregon, so I was familiar with the polite ritual of fishing your way down a pool and then relinquishing it to give other anglers a chance. But the last thing you were likely to hear from a fly fisher on a California salmon stream was, “After you, Alphonse.”
As Leonard Cohen sang in “Democracy,” “I love the country, but I can’t stand the scene.” So I drove upriver, away from the crowds, until I found a footpath that disappeared into the magical netherworld of the redwoods. I came out onto a gleaming gravel bar and was surprised to find that I had the river to myself. Now this was more like it. The canyon was saturated in natural beauty. I heard the music of wrens, their notes rising on the air in a gentle whistling. The breeze was full of damp and pleasing river scents. I breathed the tang of the forest and listened to the river’s chords, a sound as deep and sonorous as Pablo Casals’s cello.
It took me two hours of fruitless casting to figure out why I had the place all to myself. The salmon hadn’t moved this far upstream. It was clear I had a lot to learn. Fly fishing for Pacific salmon is basically fly fishing for steelhead — but with some very important adjustments. Those adjustments spell the difference between success and failure. Figuring it all out has baffled many a West Coast fly fisher. There was a time when West Coast anglers believed that Pacific salmon couldn’t be taken on a fly rod at all and then a long period when it was accepted as gospel that they could be taken only on sinking lines. These days, fly fishers are catching king salmon on floating lines and even taking cohos on dry flies. That is, they’re doing so in some situations. Working it out has been a long process of trial and error — in my case, mostly the latter. It’s a good thing I had some help.
That help came to me in the form of a book called Fly Fishing for Pacific Salmon. It was written principally by Bruce Ferguson and Les Johnson (with some help from other people), and it was published way back in 1985 by Frank Amato Publications in Portland, Oregon. This softbound volume, with its grainy black-and-white photographs, looked to be in serious contention for the ugliest book ever printed. But when it came to deciphering what was going on in a salmon river, it was the Rosetta Stone.
Through this book I discovered that there is more to the sport than pram fishing to kings stacked up in green pools. I learned that by bushwhacking, I could avoid the human zoos that form along the rivers. That salmon could be fished for “steelhead style” in runs and even riffles. That there are different ways to go about the job in each distinct section of the river, from tidal pools to headwaters. And that a flyrodder can find action in the estuaries and in salt water.
I learned about the various stages in a salmon’s life and the mysterious routes of their migrations. I read all about the various sink rates of the fly lines I would need to catch these fish in rivers and the ocean. I discovered the importance of rainfall, stream flows, tidal action, and the art of timing the runs. I read about the different behavior of each of the five species of Pacific salmon (six, if you count steelhead trout.)
When Fly Fishing for Pacific Salmon first came out more than 20 years ago, it was the only how-to book on the subject.
In 2008, it was rewritten and hugely expanded — really, a whole new book. It had a new title, as well:
Fly Fishing for Pacific Salmon II. Still softbound, it cost 40 bucks, a king’s ransom, if you’ll forgive the pun, but worth every penny. Unlike its butt-ugly predecessor, it looked gorgeous, with many beautiful color photographs and fly plates. Like its predecessor, the writing in it was clear and informative. But there was a lot more research in the second volume — in fact, a staggering amount. For example, there was an entire chapter devoted to what salmon feed on while in the ocean. (No need for a similar chapter on rivers — salmon don’t eat once they return to their natal streams for the spawning ceremony. Why they strike at flies is still anybody’s guess, one of those mysteries that leave you in awe of the universe.)
The need for a new edition was apparent: so much more had been learned since the first edition was published. Fly fishers continue to evolve, right on schedule. It’s one of the miracles of nature. The new addition also contained a short and pithy foreword by Russell Chatham, whose essay collection, The Angler’s Coast (1976), first filled me with an aching desire to move to Northern California. One odd thing, though: Fly Fishing for Pacific Salmon II, like its predecessor, is still essentially — and unaccountably — the only comprehensive guide out there on the subject. And this is despite the growth of interest in the sport.
That might have something to do with the fact that the art of fly fishing for kings and other salmon was very slow to develop on the West Coast, despite the plentitude of fish. Kings couldn’t be taken on conventional fly tackle. Specifically, they couldn’t be tempted to rise up from the bottom to chase a fly that was fished with the “greased line” method so popular with Atlantic salmon and steelhead fly fishers. In time, fly anglers learned that if they used heavy sinking lines, the kings could be caught. But handling the big ordnance and heavy rods necessary for this wasn’t to everyone’s liking at first. King salmon hooked accidentally were often deliberately broken off by anglers who feared that the big brutes would bust up their delicate fly tackle.
But a few steelhead anglers were determined to catch salmon on their fly rods. Slowly, the sport came to take hold on the West Coast. The authors (Ferguson covers salt water, Johnson freshwater) chronicle how maverick anglers throughout the Pacific Northwest, often working independently of each other, began splicing heavy fly lines onto thin running lines and designing new and more powerful rod tapers to get the kind of distances and depth necessary to reach the salmon. A band of happy warriors from the San Francisco Bay Area, fishing on the Smith River at midcentury, extended the limits of what could be done with fly rods. “Armed with fiberglass rods and fast-sinking Wet Cel or lead-core shooting heads, they developed angling techniques, honing every nuance of the cast, the mend, the drift of the fly and the retrieve to a fine edge while testing the mettle of bright, powerful salmon of 30 to 50 pounds and more.”Their pioneering efforts — coupled with their level of success — inspired fly fishers throughout the Pacific Northwest to start pursuing salmon in earnest. Since then, the history of the sport has proceeded right along the lines of technological breakthroughs in tackle and equipment. These days, fly fishers seem to have it all — except perhaps fish.
This fact hasn’t escaped the authors. They note that now that our tackle and equipment have been refined to match just about any situation we might encounter while fly fishing, all we lack are healthy runs of salmon. For centuries, salmon took “everything nature could throw at them,” in the words of the authors, only to run afoul of the backwash, so to speak, of our technological development — environmental degradation. Many West Coast salmon runs are now threatened, if not functionally extinct. I have always found it paradoxical that fly fishing, so dependent upon technological advancements, is at heart a kind of neo-Romantic reaction against the technological world.
Not all the secrets of the salmon have been cracked, even if our scientific knowledge proceeds apace. As I write this review, a scientist at Oregon State University is announcing to the world that he believes he has at last found hard evidence of what many fish scientists have long suspected: that salmon migrate by means of an internal compass in their brains that allows the fish to follow the Earth’s magnetic field. But mysteries still abound — and maybe anglers need mysteries more than solutions. Albert Einstein once said: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” Here’s what Les Johnson has to say, albeit it more prosaically: “Salmon fishing with a fly is tough and thrilling and full of surprises. This is how it should remain. Heaven forbid that we ever turn salmon fly-fishing into the next perfect science.”
Yes, but maybe in the next edition of their book, the authors will have come up with a sure-fire technique that will allow even a duffer like me to put the fly in front of the fish without the salmon acting like they’re in a coma.
Michael Checchio
