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Fly Fishing for Cannibal Trout

Learn how to think like an aquatic serial killer using streamers that match the target species.

Fly Fishing for Cannibal Trout

In heavily populated trout streams, a great deal of the piscivorous feeding behavior is bass-on-bass, brook-on-brook, and brown-on-brown violence . . . in other words, it’s cannibalism. (Jay Nichols photo)

This article was originally titled "Cannibal Trout" in the April/May 2013 issue of Fly Fisherman magazine.

The fish we most love to catch eat MEAT. By meat, I mean other fish. Fish that feed on other fish are technically referred to as piscivores. If you’ve ever thrown a Rapala at it, or jerked a giant streamer past it, that fish is a piscivore. But that’s only part of the whole meat-eating story. In heavily populated trout streams, a great deal of the piscivorous feeding behavior is bass-on-bass, brook-on-brook, and brown-on-brown violence . . . in other words, it’s cannibalism.

Some people might view cannibalism as evolution’s...

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