Our Outdoors: Skewed Vision

By dakotaedgeoutdoors on June 17, 2024

By Nick Simonson

Nick Simonson

I relate best to animals when I anthropomorphize, that is give them human qualities that help explain, at least in my mind, how they react to the world around them in a way that I might better understand those reactions. It makes sense at first, because like fish, or deer, or pheasants, I'm an animal, just with a bigger brain, some opposable thumbs and the ability to reason things out when the time calls for it. The latter of course creates this fun and sometimes frustrating circle, especially when my reasoning may not be 100 percent accurate or have the full understanding necessary for the figuring out of the puzzles presented in angling.

As sportsmen, however, we do our best to pattern the behaviors of the creatures we pursue with our limited knowledge of how they see the world, and perhaps how they see it differently from us. And it is that sense of sight that often dictates how fishing goes for many species under the open water of summer. It's easy to think that by donning a pair of goggles and going swimming off the dock we have a pretty good take on how they see the world, but my guess is it isn't exactly the way we take it in, especially across various species.

Consider pike and bass, both noted sight-focused predators. With large bulgy looking eyes positioned to catch the movement of a nearby baitfish, they rely heavily on their sight to fill their stomachs and continue surviving. They may capture their prey in different ways - the pike with a powerful dash-and-grab of a sucker or perch swimming along, the bass with a sudden inhale of a bluegill or small crappie bumbling into its area – but they both get things started with their strong sense of sight. Thus, a flashy spoon trolled on the weed edge will catch the attention of an awaiting pike, or a tube hopping on the bottom of a lake will draw the interest of a bass, even from a distance.
Beyond them and some other standard summertime targets, however, things get a bit trickier.

Consider walleyes; their vision is near super-human, and equating what we can see as people to what they can see with their specially evolved eyes is almost like giving them the X-Ray vision of Superman. Able to pick out the movement of prey species in super low light conditions, one has to raise the bar for what walleyes can see. Whether it's the dim light of dawn or dusk, the roiled waters of the shallows on a windy day, or perhaps just the dingy inflow from a swollen creek, walleyes can likely see what we can't in those turbid waters, and equating their take on the world around them becomes a bit different.

Then there are fish on the opposite side of the sight spectrum that we simply can't assign our human traits to either. Catfish and lake sturgeon have tiny eyes, and likely can detect changes in light but beyond that have limited visual acuity on their surroundings based on their sense of sight. However, with highly-developed scent- and taste-detecting cells in their barbels and mouths, they are superhuman when it comes to picking up the scent of their chosen prey or the underwater carrion they consume, making up for the lack of sight we attribute to them. With lake sturgeon too an ancient advancement in their body system is believed to allow them to pick up the electromagnetic field of other creatures, including the heartbeat of a hibernating frog which may only click once or twice in a minute. It's an opportunity to lean on that old human suggestion that when one sense fails, others are honed to make up for it. True or not, these fish have fallback senses that likely far exceed others in the aquatic world.

What science knows, what we read, and what we assemble from those pieces gleaned over time consuming articles, and more importantly pursuing these fish on the water, create our vision of what our favorite species see and experience in their world. While it likely is never fully correct no matter how much we know (or think we know), and some parts will always stay a mystery, it remains a part of the continuous effort to understand, and more importantly, catch fish…in our outdoors.

Saw It Coming. Walleyes have specialized eyes for hunting prey in dim or no light, and trying to picture what they see likely goes beyond our complete understanding. However, finding ways to catch them is an end to at least having a guess at those means they use to feed. Simonson Photo.