For blue water fishing, you want to use lures that fish can see from distance. Bright colors do this better than dark colors. Flashies work even better. As water clarity drops this principle still applies, up to the point where turbidity starts altering spectral quality. Flashies still work pretty good. Those goofy looking lures fulfill attractant criteria for multiple stages.Gidds:Those goofy neon lures work don't they? Also if you know of any actual studies in journals about this sort of thing I'd love to have the citations so I can have a look at them
A. Recogition against background (predator sees lure)
B. Activity/Coloration resembling common prey (predator is attracted to lure)
C. Finescale Coloration and/or Body Shape/Activity (predator decides to bite lure)
This is one of those semi-urban myths. Visual predators that cue on bright shiny objects (i.e. barracuda, bluefish, squid) typically will only bite people wearing shiny things in murky waters, where they can't see too well. Surf areas are typical such zones. I don't like diving inshore reefs after rainstorms, 'cuz the reduced vis fosters barracuda making uncomfortably close passes to my students. Jacks do the same thing, but they're not dangerous. Neither of these piscivores will typically get this close in clear water, but they will be attracted. When they get close enough to figure out that your shiny watch or knife is not a fish, they usually back off.
Sponges. Tunicates. Corals. Annelids. Molluscs. Algae. Fish. There are other phyla. All of these groups possess members with alarmingly bright yellow external body coloration. Most of the known forms reside in shallow tropical waters. There are also neon red and orange-colored members for most of these groups; we term these yellow-orange-red critters as displaying "alarm coloration". It's a warning for visual predators to stay away, either due to the prey possessing toxin, poison, spines, or they're mimics pretending to be dangerous.
Depends where you fish. I can catch all sorts of non-related fish species (bass, sunfish, gar, carp) in a lake using a neon lure, and if I switch out that neon lure with a flashie, I'll catch the same bloody fish. If I replace the flashie with bloodworms, ditto. Some of these fish normally eat bugs, others are piscivores, others still prefer to grub around in the mud. I can catch all three types with a yellow artificial lure.
Now if I go offshore, my target species are mostly all high speed piscivores and squid eaters. Big eyeballs to see far. Scarce food. Little discrimination based on prey color. A bright yellow lure is easy to spot at distance, and unlike a flashie, doesn't depend upon direct sunlight to reflect sparklies. Bright yellow lures have been around for decades for this very reason. Prey are attracted to them 'cuz they're easy to see.
This is one reason why you don't see brightly colored fishes in open water. Blue, white and shiny colors predominate. The rationale behind shiny colors aren't well understood, but are more common in species that display defensive polarized schooling. Some new studies postulate that the shiny coloration is a side effect of pigments with structural or physiological primary functions. This is common in many deep sea species.
Now if I take my yellow lure and drop it on a reef, I'm going to have a harder time getting a bite. The predators there are more discriminatory, and many take coloration rather seriously. There's a lot more species that engulf prey rather than chop them up. An upside to this strategy is that the engulfers can spit out nasty-tasting prey without incurring too much damage. There's a great deal of spitting out on Indo-Pacific and Caribbean reefs. Eventually these fish learn to avoid things that taste bad, or prey that resemble these things. These are the fish that won't bite my lure. I'm better off with a flashie or actual chum.
