I don't believe bass hit most lures because they believe the target it food. I think they hit mostly because they're mean, territorial and brutish. Bass don't like anybody or anything very much.

I recall a conversation I had several years ago with Dr. Loren Hill, the fisheries biology professor and researcher at the University of Oklahoma. Hill spent considerable time studying bass behavior and was involved in development of fishing products like the Color-C-Lector, a device that told anglers what colors were most visible down in the depths where light fades and colors disappear.

I asked Hill if lures that were exact copies of living creatures were necessarily more effective than lures bearing little resemblance to anything alive. I don't recall his exact words, but I do remember the gist of his answer: Aggressive and territorial behaviors, not hunger, were more likely to get a bass caught.

Does that mean that anglers shouldn't use lifelike lures? No, not necessarily. Numerous realistic-looking lures are on the market -- soft-plastic baitfish, some crankbaits, and others -- that look remarkably like the real thing, and catch bass very well.

But anyone who's spent much time on the front deck of a bass boat can tell you that some of the most un-lifelike lures sometimes produce the best results.

But (you might argue) some lures don't look very lifelike, yet they may make sounds or vibrations that resemble something like a food source might make.

Maybe, but I'm a skeptic.

I've caught a lot of bass on buzzbaits, but in all of the thousands of hours I've spent on the water, I've never seen or heard anything that made a steady, noisy, splashing path across the surface of the water.

Many anglers, pro and amateur alike, can testify that a Rat-L-Trap or similar lipless rattling crankbait is one of the most effective bass lures in certain situations; they catch fish. But I can't imagine any creature living in the water that makes a sound like one of those loud-rattling baits.

If you're fishing in a metal boat, you can hear a Rat-L-Trap rattling away, getting louder as it approaches the boat during your retrieve, because the metal hull conducts some underwater sounds pretty efficiently.

I've heard freshwater drum drumming through the hull of a metal boat. I've heard a couple other sounds I couldn't identify though the hull. But I've never heard anything that even closely resembled the sound of a rattling lipless crankbait.

Look in my tackle box, though, and you'll find a whole tray full of Rat-L-Traps in various sizes and colors.

What's the point of all this rambling about lifelike lures? It's to point out that a perfect photocopy of a fish pasted on the side of a crankbait, or a perfect mold of a living crawfish, may not be the lure that triggers a strike from the bass swimming beneath your boat.