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Lures With Eyes

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The Riddler

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5 hours ago, EricDice said:

I agree with most who say it probably doesn’t matter much but it can’t hurt. 
 

On my flies that I tie mainly for casting egg, teasers & three way swivel rigs, I see the eyes as a necessity unless it’s a shrimp or worm pattern. 
 

I also use eyes on the soft plastics that will be suspended under a float/egg. That seems like an important ingredient for those techniques. 

What are you using for eyes on the soft plastics?

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I think (just my opinion) that some plugs should generally have them, and some generally should not. With exceptions to both of course.  Like to me, a needle should have eyes. A needle with no eyes seems unique and a little weird.  On the other hand, I think a Danny just looks right blind and actually kind of goofy with eyes. Does any of it really matter? No, i don’t think so. It’s just what has become customary for each kind of plug. 

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5 hours ago, Stripernut1 said:

I have posted about this many times; How "eyes" on lures are often a deterrent and not an attractant. There are many examples of prey developing "false" eyes to deter predators. One of my favorite examples is the Indonesian wood cutters walking in a line, in the tall grass on their way to the woods, the last guy in the line wears a mask with big eyes to help keep the tigers from snagging them...   I often sight predator-prey studies that show how visible eyes help protect prey;

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/08/study-confirms-that-painting-eyes-on-cow-butts-helps-ward-off-predators/

Food for thought...

I hope you are not suggesting that the presence of eyes on a peanut bunker will deter a striper from eating it....

Desert for thought

Two things in life I love. Fishing, and looking at the wives pictures on the milk Carton

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4 hours ago, z-man said:

What are you using for eyes on the soft plastics?

I use this to clear my head and sorta meditate once everyone is in bed. So, I admit this is really getting carried away. Lol. 
 

The eyes are really on the plain jighead/bucktail jighead. I like to use a drill to give a little indentation as a eye socket
 

I both make & glue in the eye with UV glue and shiny sequins from a thing my young daughter had. With some shiny holographic cellophane in the back for the holo look. 
 

The pupil is either black paint or I’ve been a little happier with a speck of black kids’ clay rolled into the tiniest little ball and pressed over the sequin. UV glue in layers. Then clear nail polish or else the UV glue will get cloudy. 

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The top one had bucktail to be a mini mojo sorta thing but it got tainted in a sharpie mishap, lol. Cut that hair off. 
 

I have glued/created eyes on sluggos too. Don’t have one nearby. First step is gouging a hole capable of letting glue seep through to the eye on the opposite side.
 

Then I run some thread through that hole and superglue the base of the circular eyes. The glue and thread through the center of the bait keep the eyes from falling off either side. 
 

You can get a base layer fast & dry/cured using superglue & baking soda. 

 

After that, similar process of creating an eyeball look using UV glue / etc built on top of the glue or glue & baking soda layer. Anything not on that base will typically flake off very quickly. 

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Quote

 

I hope you are not suggesting that the presence of eyes on a peanut bunker will deter a striper from eating it....


 

Many fish and prey animals have evolved to have fake eyes, they did not do that to attract predators. A study was done years ago where prey fish and predators were in a tank and the predator fish were recorded on how they attacked the prey and their success rates. It was clear that when the predator attached and the "eye" was visible to the predator, its success rate went down, makes sense to me, if you see the predator coming you have a better chance of getting away. So, let's look at a bunker with its fake eye, long ago there was two "neanderthal" bunker swimming side by side, one had a funky black dot that looked like an eye the other did not. A "neanderthal" striper is swimming up on these two and one is "looking" at him and one is not, which one is he going to attack? Which one has he learned he will have the higher success rate of capturing? The prey fish with the fake eye gets to swim away and make more prey fish with more fake eyes. If you did not get the fake eye you were eaten before you got to pass your genes on. Yes, most fish try to eat bait fish head first, but I could not count how many times I have watched a striper or other predator make that last-second turn to get the prey's head first and until that second the eyes were not visible to the predator. If the prey fish had a "spot/fake eye" down by the tail, the preditor might have not attacked it and attracted one without a spot... Again, lots of examples out there of spots on tails.

One thing that is sure and provable is eyes on lure catch fisherman very well. In the end, the confidence you fish your lure with will catch you more fish so if you believe you need an eye on your lure then you should have one. I try to look at as much science as I can to help my fishing and the science for predator-prey relationships clearly show that eyes are a deterrent, not an attractor, to a predator.

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I own lures that are forty years old and are as productive productive as the day I purchase them but with no eyes because they fell off the lure.. The only thing that I have done to these lures is let them dry out for a week or two and then reseal then by dipping the lure in to a can of clear lacquer or varnish and let drip dry... 

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Every time I see one of these discussions, I think of what happened when I used to liveline bunker for bluefish in a Connecticut harbor.

 

Everyone knows how bluefish like to strike the "tail" of a bait or lure.  I put "tail" in quotation marks, because we never think of how a fish defines the "tail" of the bait that it's attacking.  Is it the end without the eyes?

 

To go back to my Connecticut harbor...

 

The boats were moored in a river, which had a pretty good current once the tide began to run.  If the bluefish were blitzing the bunker, finding them was easy, but if things were quiet, particularly after the sun had come up a bit, we used to drift rather than anchor, in order to cover more water,  And, because we were targeting bluefish, we'd hook then bunker near the tail.

 

When the tide was still running slowly, the bunker could still swim around a bit, and the bluefish hit their tails as expected.  But once the tide began to run, the drift sped up and we'd start pulling the bunker backward, with the tail pointed toward the boat and the head trailing behind.  Suddenly, we began missing strikes.

 

That's because the bluefish switched their working definition of "tail."  It was no longer the end of the fish farthest away from the eyes, which had a nicely forked tail that propelled the bunker through the water.  Instead, the "tail" was the end of the bunker that HAD the eyes, did not have any fins, but was the last part of the fish to pass by as  the boat drifted down-current.

 

In other words, it wasn't the presence or absence of eyes that determined the head or the tail, but instead the direction of travel.  While bluefish strike the tail, a fish that characteristically strikes the head would, under that assumption, hit at the end of the fish that pointed in the direction that the fish was moving, regardless of whether eyes were present.  

 

Given that experience, I don't pay too much attention to eyes.

 

"I have always believed that outdoor writers who come out against fish and wildlife conservation are in the wrong business. To me, it makes as much sense golf writers coming out against grass.."  --  Ted Williams

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18 hours ago, Stripernut1 said:

One of my favorite examples is the Indonesian wood cutters walking in a line, in the tall grass on their way to the woods, the last guy in the line wears a mask with big eyes to help keep the tigers from snagging them..

I wonder how they decide who get to go last!

 

I'm no sharpie, but I don't put eyes on my homemade fluke jigs and they catch fine. To me pondering eyes on plugs & flies isn't nearly as ridiculous as worrying about tog jig color!

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9 hours ago, Stripernut1 said:

Many fish and prey animals have evolved to have fake eyes, they did not do that to attract predators. A study was done years ago where prey fish and predators were in a tank and the predator fish were recorded on how they attacked the prey and their success rates. It was clear that when the predator attached and the "eye" was visible to the predator, its success rate went down, makes sense to me, if you see the predator coming you have a better chance of getting away. So, let's look at a bunker with its fake eye, long ago there was two "neanderthal" bunker swimming side by side, one had a funky black dot that looked like an eye the other did not. A "neanderthal" striper is swimming up on these two and one is "looking" at him and one is not, which one is he going to attack? Which one has he learned he will have the higher success rate of capturing? The prey fish with the fake eye gets to swim away and make more prey fish with more fake eyes. If you did not get the fake eye you were eaten before you got to pass your genes on. Yes, most fish try to eat bait fish head first, but I could not count how many times I have watched a striper or other predator make that last-second turn to get the prey's head first and until that second the eyes were not visible to the predator. If the prey fish had a "spot/fake eye" down by the tail, the preditor might have not attacked it and attracted one without a spot... Again, lots of examples out there of spots on tails.

One thing that is sure and provable is eyes on lure catch fisherman very well. In the end, the confidence you fish your lure with will catch you more fish so if you believe you need an eye on your lure then you should have one. I try to look at as much science as I can to help my fishing and the science for predator-prey relationships clearly show that eyes are a deterrent, not an attractor, to a predator.

I have always heard that fish that have spots near their tails have them because larger fish attack the head first and if they see an “eye” near the tail and they strike that then the prey is more likely to get away. 

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On 1/18/2023 at 11:37 AM, The Riddler said:

I throw all my stuff blind. Everything I make is blind.  Some feel eyes are needed on a lure for fish to hit it. What say you?

Yes fish focus on the eye:)some use it to escape being eaten:th:

"The decoy eye fools predators into believing that the red fish's tail is actually its head. When a predator makes a grab for the fish's tail, the red fish has time to swim away."

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1 hour ago, codfish said:

Yes fish focus on the eye:)some use it to escape being eaten:th:

"The decoy eye fools predators into believing that the red fish's tail is actually its head. When a predator makes a grab for the fish's tail, the red fish has time to swim away."

I feel like you were addressing….

 

1 hour ago, z-man said:

I have always heard that fish that have spots near their tails have them because larger fish attack the head first and if they see an “eye” near the tail and they strike that then the prey is more likely to get away. 

This one!

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