Learn About a Fish's Sense of Hearing

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Jim Dowd at Zoar Outdoor for Expert Village to talk with you about fly casting and fly fishing. A fish’s hearing is another sense that I would like to talk to you about, and this one is equal important as well as smell and seeing. Hearing is a very complex issue for us because we use our ears to hear. The trout’s senses are completed different. They have a lateral line that runs along the sides from behind their gills all the way to their tails, which contains sensory and smell organs. But they also have a bony structure called an odor lift inside their skull. Those organs can sense any vibration in the water at a pitch that we can’t even register. So it is really important that, not only coming up to a fish outside of the trout’s window, outside its vision, and washing your hands in the mud, to be careful about wading. Now imagine this: I’m seeing a trout over here and I am walking through the water like so. Imagine the noise that you are making, all this commotion. See the waves going away from me. That will spook a fish. They may not swim away in terror, but I guarantee you they will be alert to your presence. A much better way to move through the water is to do it like a natural predator, whether it is a mink or a heron. For example, a heron would move through the water nice and slow and silent, and it doesn’t move until it has got silent footing. So if you lift your feet and move slowly, don’t make a wave, and if you can get your foot out of the water without splashing a lot, do so. That’s relatively quiet, and it doesn’t do this. So concentrate on that. Think in terms of what a natural predator would do, and you’ll find that your approach is much more successful."