Nobel Laureates and Fly Fishing
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- Published on Sunday, 15 November 2009 19:37
- Written by Bob Graham
I don’t know how many Nobel laureates were/are fly fishers – quite a few I suspect but you can do the checking yourself. However, there are three, all ethologists, who we should be paying attention to. They are – Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907-1988), Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989) and Karl Von Frisch (1886-1982). They shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1973.
Ethology is, very basically, the study of animal behaviour and they considered animals as diverse as wasps, sticklebacks and humans. They were particularly interested in the “Law of Heterogeneous Summation” which, again very basically, says that a weak stimulus can be reinforced by a compensating strong stimulus.
All of them carried out experiments using “supernormal stimulus” to show that all animals reacted to a perceived rather than actual situation. One that interested me was the feeding patterns of herring gulls. These birds have a red mark on the underside of the beak that a chick pecks at when it wants to be fed. The experiment showed that the chick would peck more vigorously at a red pencil, much larger than the mark on the adult’s beak. The red pencil was a “supernormal stimulus”. Some of you may know that sticklebacks attack a slim figure with a red flash but do you know that a fatter figure with a grey flash prompts courting behaviour?
Angelina Jolie’s pouting lips are a stimulus and if you combine this with her more obvious attributes you are into the area of “supernormal stimulus”. Yes, it applies to us as well although our chances in that direction are fairly low.
So, on to our main interest of fly fishing; can this research be applied to fill our baskets? Unsurprisingly the answer is “yes”, particularly if you are a river fisher. The experiments have been carried out and the results have been known for years. The good news, or possibly bad if you have a bulging fly box, is that two or three very simple flies have been shown to work more than effectively. There are also two magic materials that make up these flies, cock pheasant tail and hare lug. Add some thread and copper or gold wire and every business depending on the sale of fly tying materials is down the big white pan tomorrow.
You can go off and check for yourself if you don’t believe me and I know that many fly tying fanatics will refuse to give up their search for the new wonder material. For those of us who want an easy life with a few simple flies just sit down and tie up pheasant tail nymphs, gold or copper ribbed hare lugs and Teeny nymphs. Any trout in any river anywhere in the world will take one or all of these flies. These flies all meet the rules of the “Law of Heterogeneous Summation”. It has been proved time and time again in practice and during the past fifty years various experiments have been carried out all of which show the patterns to be “supernormal stimulants” within the meaning of the law.
Scoff if you want but do it after you carry out your own research into the literature. Then when you stop scoffing start fishing and you will know what should be on the end of your line.
Bob Graham is an occasionally lucky gentleman who claims he does not do very much these days other than try to catch trout five or six days a week. Bob is a regular at Hillend Reservoir and lives in Whitburn West Lothian.