One is underground and the other is in the water. Why do fish like to eat earthworms?

Friends who like fishing know that among the various types of baits, earthworms are the best, so it is a recognized fact that fish like to eat earthworms.

But have you ever thought about why fish like to eat earthworms? The eating habits of an animal are closely related to the environment in which it lives. In other words, the food an animal likes to eat can definitely be found in the environment in which it lives. However, fish and earthworms seem to be creatures from two completely different worlds. One lives in water, and the other lives in soil. They never interact with each other. So why are fish so obsessed with earthworms? There are two reasons.

First of all, on the surface, the living environment of fish and earthworms seems to be completely different, but in fact the two are not incompatible.

Earthworms do live underground on weekdays, but after every rainfall, many earthworms crawl out of the soil. This is because rainwater seeps into the soil and fills up the gaps, which makes it impossible for the earthworms to breathe, so they have to crawl to the ground to breathe. In cities, these earthworms that crawl out are either crushed to death by humans or burrow back into the soil after the soil dries up a little. But if they are on the banks of rivers and ponds, the situation is completely different. The earthworms that crawl out will be washed underwater by the turbulent rainwater that gathers on the ground, thus becoming a delicacy for fish.

So, earthworms are a delicious daily snack for fish, and it is reasonable for them to be obsessed with earthworms.

Secondly, there are historical reasons why fish like earthworms. The birthplace of life was originally the ocean, and the ancestor of earthworms was a kind of segmented worm that lived in the ocean during the Cambrian period. As time went by and the geology changed, some worms entered the river from the ocean and evolved into new branches. After a long time, some worms living in fresh water slowly moved to land and gradually evolved into today's earthworms. Whether it is worms living in the ocean or worms living in rivers, they are the favorite food of fish, so fish's love of eating earthworms is a habit that has been engraved in their genes since a long time ago.

This is not just a guess. In order to verify this guess, the Berkeley Fish Research Center once conducted an experiment.

They prepared some perch that had never seen worms since birth, placed them in a special fish tank, and then hung two kinds of "bait" in the fish tank. They were called bait, but in fact they were just some plastic. One was plastic fragments, and the other was worm-like plastic with links. The experimental results were very obvious. The number of times perch attacked worm-like plastic was more than 10 times that of plastic fragments, which fully proved that loving earthworms is a program engraved in the genes of fish.

This experiment also tells us that when using earthworms to fish, it is actually not necessary to cut the earthworms into several pieces, because even if there is no particularly obvious smell, fish will still be attracted by the shape of the earthworms.

Based on this principle, there is a more extreme approach, which is to not use edible bait at all, but to use fake bait directly. This fishing method is called "luya fishing". This fishing method uses plastic worm-like models or small fish-like models to pretend to be bait, and sometimes in order to better attract bait, some flavors are applied to these fake baits.

Can you really catch fish using lures? The answer is yes.

Although it is possible, it is quite difficult. Most anglers who use fake baits say that they often get nothing or very little. It seems that although the love of earthworms is a program engraved in the genes of fish, fish are not as stupid as we think. They can still distinguish between real and fake. However, compared with using real bait, using fake bait still has certain advantages. For example, the shelf life of fake bait is long, it can be reused, and it is low-cost and convenient. For those who don’t care whether they get anything or not, it is indeed a good choice.