Do Not Mess With Fish 234,

and you thought fish were fun!

 well this is a bit of fun, how many fish or parts of fish can you see in the above picture? in the bottom half on the right one minus head, its tail with a second behind it, a third with its tail nearest us facing away from us and one with its black eye on top of a Lampsilis mussel, and there is the clue,

the one on top of the mussel is not a fish but a lure, the mussel employs this fleshy fish lookalike to lure bass into eating the lure, the mussel when it feels the fish taking the lure releases thousands of its young into the fishes mouth, where they attach themselves to the fishes gills and grow as a parasite sucking nutrients from the unwilling victim, until they grow big enough to drop off and with luck a new mussel bed will be born,

above is a diagram of how all of this happens,

but here is the thing, bass as fish are not fools as any bass angler will tell you, the lure has to be very convincing to fool a bass, so how does a mussel that can not see know how to grow a lure to fool the bass? grab a coffee and watch this video if you have time and all will become plain in the escalating war of life as mussel verses bass, grow the wrong lure and it is extinction for you!