Crawfish color selection

[Drew1233]

Can any of you all help me out on this one? I thought that it goes throw a basic green pumpkin or something of that nature unless it's spring time. This weekend I was on the river and all they would bite was something with red in it. I know it does get a little twisted in muddy water but say in regular clarity what would your suggestion be? Thanks in advance, Drew

[R19]

I did not realize there were so many different colors until I saw this link...


http://www.pixelpayback.com/craws/hoverbox/index.html

[jcb]

My understanding is that the red-colored crawfish are males who have molted after mating. Maybe that's what you keyed on to?

[Bobby Headrick]

They also become red when you place them into a pot of boling water and crawfish boil lol. But seriously they change color a lot depending on the moon phase, breeding, they spawn every 30 days, and when they molt, which is that pale orange like color. If you stay with the green punkin based colors that have a little orange,red, blue strands in it you should be fine, best thing to do would be when you get to your spot turn over a few rocks and grab a few crawfish and then go from there..

[smashdn]

I either fish green pumpkin with red fleck or black with red fleck. The beaver style soft plastic baits.

[Whitski]

I've never seen any but the greenish and the brownish. Camo for the environment, basically. I know bass fishermen often go with a blue jig or blue craw but I didn't know that they are actually blue! When are they blue like that? Never seen one in the streams, rivers I fish.

Used to catch and sell them to my neighbor guys in the summer when I was a kid so I turned a lotta rocks.

Curious, what stage, time of year are they blue?

[sweetwater]

I've never seen any but the greenish and the brownish. Camo for the environment, basically. I know bass fishermen often go with a blue jig or blue craw but I didn't know that they are actually blue! When are they blue like that? Never seen one in the streams, rivers I fish.

Used to catch and sell them to my neighbor guys in the summer when I was a kid so I turned a lotta rocks.

Curious, what stage, time of year are they blue?

Blue lures are not blue because they are attempting to mimic a natural color. They are blue because the blue end of the light spectrum will penetrate water deeper than any other color hence the bait can be seen at a deeper depth than any other color. The red end of the light spectrum will disappear first in water.

[Les Young]

Blue lures are not blue because they are attempting to mimic a natural color. They are blue because the blue end of the light spectrum will penetrate water deeper than any other color hence the bait can be seen at a deeper depth than any other color. The red end of the light spectrum will disappear first in water.

Why then will a big old 3/4 ounce black & red spinnerbait get so many more hits at night than a black & blue one ??? Not critcizing you at all, but i have always wondered that when red was supposed to be the first color to disappear that it will beat black & blue hands down all of the time. Did lastnight too as I tied a black red on for a young kid that had never fished a spinnerbait while i yoyoed a black/ blue short arm & he caught exactly three times the fish i did. lol He thought i was telling him one when i told him he would get a lot more bights than i did, but believed after he saw it first hand. lol

[Drew1233]

Why then will a big old 3/4 ounce black & red spinnerbait get so many more hits at night than a black & blue one ??? Not critcizing you at all, but i have always wondered that when red was supposed to be the first color to disappear that it will beat black & blue hands down all of the time. Did lastnight too as I tied a black red on for a young kid that had never fished a spinnerbait while i yoyoed a black/ blue short arm & he caught exactly three times the fish i did. lol He thought i was telling him one when i told him he would get a lot more bights than i did, but believed after he saw it first hand. lol

I have to agree with you on this one. If you look at pictures of crawfish in Kentucky some of them have dark blue on them. And honestly I don't think a fish is gonna sit there and look at a jig and say "that thing has 14 pieces of blue in it, darn thing must be fake." If you put a bait in a fishes face he's gonna go after it. I had it explained to me once like this "a fish doesn't have hands. It's gonna use its mouth to find out if something is food or not." I think if it's in his face, looks good, and smells good. The fish is gonna eat it. Now when they're wanting to be picky and a pain in the butt then yea you might want to be a little more specific, but for the most part I think if it looks like a crawdad, it's gonna at least grab it. and I don't get the black and red spinnerbait thing myself either. I think the fish are just weird

[sweetwater]

Why then will a big old 3/4 ounce black & red spinnerbait get so many more hits at night than a black & blue one ??? Not critcizing you at all, but i have always wondered that when red was supposed to be the first color to disappear that it will beat black & blue hands down all of the time. Did lastnight too as I tied a black red on for a young kid that had never fished a spinnerbait while i yoyoed a black/ blue short arm & he caught exactly three times the fish i did. lol He thought i was telling him one when i told him he would get a lot more bights than i did, but believed after he saw it first hand. lol

I was just stating a fact about colors of light penetrating water. I wasn't trying to speculate as to why one color catches fish at certain times and another will not. I don't know for sure as to why what you're saying is true but it is true a good part of the time. When it comes to fishing for predatory fish at night I was always under the impression that noise and disturbed water (such as most spinnerbaits are intentionally designed to create) is more important than color but that is not always true in all instances as well. Perhaps to a fish that spinnerbait you mentioned will appear a more natural shade of black or grey when submerged in water at night hence the good bites that can occur with them. Of course I'm just speculating because I have no way to know exactly what a fish may be thinking. I do know that no saltwater fisherman that knows what he is doing is without a large assortment of lures with the color blue in them for the sole purpose of being more visible in deeper waters. Since it reflects practically all colors of the spectrum including both red and blue white is another popular color for fishing in deeper waters. Being a avid snorkel diver in my younger days I also know that anything red will quickly turn to black or gray when submerged in water and anything blue will stay blue or at least it did for as deep as I was able to free dive. The following link may shed some light (LOL) as to why so many creatures that are prey for predatory fishes are red or black or have said colors as part of their color scheme. http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/facts/red-color.html

[Les Young]

I wasn't saying you were wrong in any way whatsoever & totally agree with you. I just find it interesting as in this case how that the first color to dissipate is the one that gets bit way more often than a color that holds it's hue a lot better supposedly. Just kind of goes against the grain of what we've been told about light penetration & lure colors.