Two months ago I wrote an article about the best times to fish. In that article I tried to demonstrate with actual fish catch data, that fish can be caught at all times of the day or night. Modern technology is great but sometimes that greatness can be misleading if you believe everything that you read. One example is the Solunar Tables that are published in nearly every outdoor magazine today (but not this one). If you want one man’s opinion based on lots of data, those tables are not worth the paper that they are printed on.
We all know that the moon controls the tides in the ocean. As the tides change the behavior of the fish in those waters also changes. That’s in saltwater, but in freshwater it’s another thing. As a person with a science background I have always been bothered about the theory that the position of the moon relative to the sun as seen from earth changes the behavior of fish. It never made sense to me so I started studying the problem and tried to verify the theory with my own fishing experiences. The idea that the position of the moon and sun relative to the earth affects fish behavior was first introduced in 1936 by John Alden Knight. He believed that there were periodic biorhythms that were influenced by the moon that affected the behavior of animals. Biorhythms I asked myself, is that like karma, whatever that is. Well folks I need more proof than biorhythms as proof so I dug a little deeper.
Shortly after Knight published his discovery, a fellow named Dr. Frank Brown of Northwestern University decided to do some experimenting in his laboratory in Chicago using oysters. He put several oysters in a glass tank and observed them over a period of time. From the patterns of the oysters opening and closing their shells, he compared that movement to the position of the moon and sun at the times of the openings. From that experiment he rationalized that John Alden Knight was correct in his findings that fish react in accordance to the position of the moon relative to the sun when viewed from the earth. Just as a bit of background, Dr. Brown is rather famous for his publications about how plants absorb water more when the moon is high overhead.
In a more recent study, a fishing guide named Joe Bucher decided to collect some real data using, of all things, fish to determine the legitimacy of the solunar theory. He didn’t get the acclaim that Knight and Brown got because he concluded from real data that there was no validity to the times listed in the tables.
Here is where I jumped on the band wagon. I have more than ten years of detailed data on all of my fish catches and I decided to spend some time comparing this data to the tables. In my studies I used fish catches totaling more than 729 fish for the daytime study and 61 fish catches for the night time studies. The difference of course is because I just don’t fish that much at night. I sampled 12 months of data for daytime catches and the results are shown in top image.
I only got a 21.7 percent correlation with the tables meaning that only that small percent of the time the tables were right. The other 78.3 percent of the time I caught fish outside the listed times. Remember that if you flip a coin and call the results, you will be right 50% of the time.
Using a slightly smaller sample size of the 61 night catches, I did the same comparisons shown in bottom image. This time the results were even worse producing only 18.2 percent correlation with the tables.
Considering the worldwide popularity of the Solunar Tables, what is a person to do now? After all, these tables are in every recognized hunting and fishing publication in the world and the tables are accurate to the tenth decimal place because of the capability of today’s computers. My only advice would be to remember if we look back far enough, there were publications that proved that the world was flat. It took hundreds of years to prove that theory wrong.
Of course I do believe that the position of the sun in the sky, and the clarity of the air below it make fish behave differently. But the moon, someone still has to prove that to me with some data that I can believe. So guys and gals, don’t go scheduling your vacation based on the tables, you’ll only be fooling yourself.