A little learning I – An introduction

The “educated trout” is a pervasive leitmotif in fly fishing. A fish that discriminates, a fish that is refined, wary, not easily fooled. The title seems to have originated in a number of ways. At its most prosaic it may have its start in the snobbery and prejudice of the English chalkstreams at the time angling with a dry fly began to impress on the imagination. The only good trout was a dry fly caught trout and by association a Gentleman only fished dry flies to trout that were themselves of a class worthy to have pearls cast before them. No swine these fish, they had gone to the right schools, kept the right company and lived in a country estate that Capability Brown would have been happy designing, carefully manicured and managed. They were fastidious in their habits but only to an extent, not to the extreme where they would become a bore and refuse all offerings.

This is not what occurs to me when thinking about educated trout. The received view of a bygone age, though it still hangs on, is not at all interesting. I have been thinking about whether or not trout can learn to tell the difference between a fly and its imitation. I have been wondering whether trout can be educated to the extent that the moniker is appropriate.

Whole books, chapters in books and numerous articles have been written about selective trout. In some ways the selective trout might be the new icon of the fly fishing world in the same way a Test or Itchen trout was back in the day (perhaps because they were often selective feeders). But selective trout aren’t educated trout. Not in the terms I am thinking about anyway. There are good behavioural reasons for a trout to feed selectively and these reasons revolve mainly around managing feeding efficiency in the face of abundant food items. All trout can become selective at times. In some rich waters trout will be selective more often than in other waters but it is not a response learnt in adversity and placed in the memory for future danger. That the apparent behaviour, the close scrutiny of a drifting fly, may be very similar makes the distinction a little hard to clarify.

I’ll try though. Of course.

For a selectively feeding trout the fly is rejected because it doesn’t fit an ephemeral mental image of a real fly hatching at the time. This “search image” defines what the trout will accept and if your artificial doesn’t match the fish’s mental image your fly won’t be taken. Conversely, an educated fish is looking for clues which will tell it that this fly represents danger, the danger of being hooked. As such an educated trout’s close scrutiny may happen during a hatch and look exactly like a selective trout’s examination but it may also happen at any other time. The fish is always selective if you like but doesn’t necessarily have to form a specific search image to be picky about what it eats.

This is likely a rather poor and too short a summary so I would point you in the direction of Bob Wyatt’s excellent writing on the subject of selective trout. I know that there are other books out there (notably one with an appropriate title) but Mr Wyatt’s book is streaks ahead in my humble opinion. Not that I don’t have differences with the man for he argues that selectivity explains all the difficulties (along with operator error) whereas I am wondering whether there aren’t other factors involved.

I don’t think there is much argument with the notion of a selective trout. The behavioural ecology which explains the phenomena is well grounded and it doesn’t call for any deep cognitive ability on the part of the fish. But, as I have outlined it doesn’t help to explain whether there are educated trout.

The debate has two camps. In one the idea of a trout which learns to discriminate between an angler’s fly and the real thing is readily accepted. Accepted it has to be said based on the observations of anglers, a notoriously fickle basis for any opinion. There is a slightly unpleasant side to this elevation of our quarry too. Donating education on a trout lifts the fish to a level where the angler and quarry are on a more equal footing. Imbuing the trout with a “human” level of intelligence reflects well on its captor or, by contrast, an excuse for its lack of capture. That this is just so much bollocks really doesn’t seem to figure much in the process. Egos are astonishingly blind constructs. And curiously, if one asks the question of how a trout discriminates between a real fly and an artificial the answer is a little murky. Much as elevating the intelligence of trout to a level where their capture is an indication (once more) of the clearly more refined intellect of the captor the corollary, that trout have to have some cognitive ability to become so educated, gets short shrift. We might like, in the heat of the moment, to project a high level of acumen onto the fish but in the cold light of day the thought that a fish (a fish!), cold, small brained and befinned has any cognitive ability at all is one we often shrink from. Indeed, in the other camp, there is a large body of fishermen who refuse to believe in the idea that a trout can be bright enough to reject a fly because it knows it not to be the real thing from experience. This wing of the angling fraternity highlight faults all on the side of the angler (as well as a the short lived myopia of a selective fish). To blame are a clumsiness of approach, micro-drag, tippet glare, in fact anything which keeps trout firmly in the dumb, cold-bloodied world and far away from our hairless mammalian light and warmth. That trout might have to learn to avoid tippet glare or micro drag is never discussed.

This dichotomy has interested me for a while. On the one hand I am (and certainly was) in the camp which says the vast majority of my lack of success can be put down to the klutz holding the rod – err me that would be then. Poor casting (of course), poor presentation (naturally), clumsiness (well yes I hold my hand up to that too) are all aspects of my very mediocre ability. However, when I began to think about it I didn’t see why trout had to be so lowly that all explanations for refusals had to originate from my cackhandedness. Not that this isn’t a good explanation of course, just that it doesn’t have to be the only one. And while the thought of the educated trout has captivated me for a while it has been brought to a head since my move to the States through experiences on a couple of local rivers. On my last visit, before I settled in to watch sex I had, if not quite an epiphany, at least more material to throw on the fire. This will be duly thrown into the mix in a later post.

I suppose I am asking why do trout not discriminate against our flies? Why can’t they learn that our flies are bad juju and avoid them with alacrity? Such questions implicitly make the assumption that trout do not learn. The evidence is there for all of us to see. We keep catching trout even on the very hardest fished water. But a counter argument would be that they only continue to be caught because fishermen are involved in an endless arms race of fly design to keep catching the fish. So I could put it another way. How do trout learn to avoid our flies? Putting it this way presupposes that trout indeed can learn and remember. If this is true it raises the question of how on earth they do it. I mean our flies do look like the natural insect or at least look enough like something they feed on to provoke an “eat it” response. The level of cognitive ability needed to successfully make the discrimination and the depth of learning and memory for this discrimination to work over time would be quite an astonishing feat for such a dumb, cold bloodied animal would it not?

So in a series of posts (as yet uncounted) I want to go through what biologists may have to tell us, to remove the emotive connection of a fisherman and see whether the scientific literature would support a notion of the educated trout. Clearly there is a lot of fishing lore here and what I may delve into could, in the cold light of print, be “bleedin’ obvious.” The point though is to sidestep the experience of fishers and see if it has any basis or, if not, why not.

A word at the end. This is a purely (dare I say it) an intellectual pursuit. An armchair rummage through the literature to see whether there is any basis for trout being able to learn to avoid our flies and a ramble around what I feel may be connected areas (though the connection may be tenuous at best). It will not change the way I fish nor my appreciation of fishing. It is simply that looking down the cold and impersonal barrel of a long winter it feels like time to air out the cobwebs on some topics that keep me thinking about fish, fishing and, well just keep me thinking really. How’s that for eloquence.

Tally ho!