Are Worms the Best Fishing Bait? (Why Fish Bite Worms)
Worms are one of the most popular fishing baits available. The truth is, at least in freshwater, there is no more widely used bait. I can assure you, most bait shops carry nightcrawlers and everyone has caught at least one fish in their life using them.
Worms are very good at catching bullheads, catfish, trout, sunfish, bluegills, walleye, rock bass, striped bass, and crappie. They have erratic motions, emit great fish-attracting scent, and are visually appealing to hungry fish.
In this article, we will go into great depth on this topic. Worms and nightcrawlers are some of the best fishing baits that work universally well for most species of small and medium-sized gamefish.
They are not THE BEST bait for any given species of fish but they are one of the only baits that will consistently catch dozens of species of fish with relative ease under most weather conditions and seasons.
Click here to learn if what fish worms as the top bait for.
Are Worms the Best Fishing Bait?
Trout, catfish, bullhead, bluegills, sunfish, crappie, perch, and some pickerel are easily caught using worms. Pond fishing and small placid lake fishing almost cries out for worm fishing.
Is there anything more relaxing than hooking a hunk of worm on a hook, playing out a couple of feet of line below the bobber, and tossing your bait a few feet off the dock? Anglers have practiced this method for generations because they catch fish.
Worms attract fish. Trout can smell them before they see them floating in the water. Bullheads, catfish, freshwater drum, and other bottom feeders work the weed beds, sandbars, and gravel outcroppings of lakes for food floating along the bottom.
In this setting, worms can be found naturally, washed onto the bottom by streams, and quick runoff from thunderstorms. It’s natural for bottom-feeding species to hunt earthworms.
Bluegills, sunfish, crappie, and perch are schooling fish, that like a lot of cover. An earthworm floating next to a submerged tree is impossible to resist for these social fish.
The magic of worm fishing for crappie, perch, or sunfish is that once you hook one, the others will stay around. They don’t get disturbed like they do if one of their fellow fish gets hooked on a spinner or jig. You can quickly re-worm your hook, toss it back in the same spot and odds are you’ll continue to catch fish.
Check out this helpful guide to learn which fish you can catch using PowerBait.
Why Worms Catch Fish?
Worms catch fish by generating an instinctual feeding response triggering them with natural scent, erratic motion, and worm meat that many fish are compelled to bite. Fish are predators.
The ones you’re after don’t graze, they hunt. Worms have an odor that attracts fish underwater over amazing distances. When the aroma is combined with a little red wiggle floating right in front of them, it is one of the greatest natural attractants for fish. Yes, worms are great fish bait.
Types of Worms
Red Wigglers
The red wiggler hooked on a #6 or smaller hook, with just a sinker a few inches above the worm is how most anglers get their first taste of fishing fever as kids. It’s easy to set up, allows a child as young as five-or-six the chance to do it themselves, and it produces results. Earthworms are found everywhere, from urban to agricultural areas.
Find a pile of dead leaves, some soft dirt, or a compost pile and it will be full of natures’ natural bulldozers, the earthworm. The common earthworm often called a red wiggler is just a couple of inches long, has a small diameter, but fits perfectly on a small hook.
The red wigglers much larger relative, the nightcrawler is both cursed and blessed by landscapers depending on their locale.
They’ll turn marginal dirt into quality topsoil as they dig through clay soils, creating paths for water to flow, eating organic material, and turning it into useful fertilizer, but they’ll also leave unsightly mounds of dirt on putting greens, along carefully groomed lawns, and adjacent to flower beds.
Nightcrawlers
Most people purchase nightcrawlers at convenience stores or bait and tackle shops, but they’re very easy to catch after a rainstorm or right after a cycle on your lawn sprinklers.
Nightcrawlers like moist soil, they can’t survive in wet soil so they crawl out of the ground and stretch out on concrete sidewalks and asphalt roadways. You can walk along sidewalks or roads after a summer shower and pick up hundreds of five to 10 inch long nightcrawlers in just a few minutes.
Many anglers use too much of a nightcrawler. They’ll take a big crawler, hook it repeatedly, while wrapping it around a #6 hook, leaving a lot of it hanging under the hook.
This looks great to humans but doesn’t matter to the bass, crappie, or trout you might be after. They find the crawler by smell and attack a little wiggle. The excess worm doesn’t equate to excess strikes.
It can be counterproductive if you’ve got baitfish or smaller perch or bluegill in a pond alongside catchable-sized fish.
The smaller fish will nibble away the nightcrawler, sometimes without moving your bobber. When you finally pull in your line to check your bait, you’ll often find a shiny, bare hook hanging underneath the bobber.
Mealworms & Waxworms
Many people consider mealworms and waxworms one and the same, but they’re not. The mealworm is the larvae of the mealworm beetle, while the waxworm is the larvae stage of the waxworm moth. To add to the confusion, a relative newcomer to anglers is the “superworm” a larger version of the mealworm.
Bigger isn’t necessarily better when it comes to mealworms. The larger superworm version has a harder shell that is difficult to penetrate with a hook, and as an unwanted bonus, they can bite and sting.
Both mealworms and waxworms have similar uses. They’re good for catching trout, bluegill, crappie, sunfish, perch, and bass. Fished on the bottom they’ll attract catfish as well. Their best use is often during the winter through the ice.
Mealworms and waxworms have a double-benefit to ice fishermen. They’re hardier bait that can withstand the extreme cold common to northern lakes during the winter, and they’re slow-moving bait, making them much more attractive to fish in a state of semi-hibernation by the cold water.
Some hardy “old school” ice fishermen like to keep mealworms and waxworms in their mouth between their lower lip and teeth to keep them fresh and vibrant before hooking them on and tossing them into the water.
Sandworms & Bloodworms
A big misnomer is that worm fishing is only good in freshwater. That’s not the case at all. Saltwater fish are as attracted to earthworms and nightcrawlers as their freshwater relatives. There are even a couple of saltwater worms that enterprising anglers like to use in bays, estuaries, and the open ocean.
There are a couple of saltwater worms that fishermen often look to. Their appearance is quite different than the innocuous red wiggler or nightcrawler. The sandworm and the bloodworm both look like something out of a bad science fiction movie.
The sandworm has a pair of pinchers by its mouth and the bloodworm is double equipment with four stinging pinchers that come out from under the body, just behind the mouth when they’re agitated.
They get agitated when you try to stab one on a hook. Many anglers have felt the sting of the bloodworm as they tried to coerce on a #2 or larger hook.
While the pinchers might intimidate the human putting on the hook, the stripers, rock bass, redfish, and other saltwater fish working the shallows and mud banks aren’t impressed at all, they’re just hungry. These worms are very popular with saltwater sport fish.
What Can You Catch with Worms?
Trout, crappie, bluegill, yellow perch, rock bass, bullheads, striped bass, catfish, largemouth bass, and walleye are the fish most commonly caught on worms.
The better question might be what can you not catch with worms? Almost any fish is attracted to a red wiggler, bloodworm, or nightcrawler. Whether they hit on these natural baits is a question more of conditions, seasons, and water temperature than the allure of these wriggling live baits.
Are Dead Worms Good Bait?
You won’t catch many fish with a dead, withered worm. With that being said, you can catch catfish with these stinking remnants of earthworms and nightcrawlers.
Catfish are attracted to “stink bait” and there isn’t much worse than the smell of earthworms left out in the sun and approaching the congealed, gelatinous mash.
Why Do Bass Bite Plastic Worms?
Plastic worms mimic baitfish, bluegills, sculpin, or other bottom-dwelling natural food items bouncing near the bottom that bass normally eat or kill. Experienced anglers often get a little humor out of watching younger fishermen throwing the latest and greatest at bass in the form of high-tech crankbaits, buzz baits, or specialized plastic lures that mimic frogs, crawdads, or small fish.
The tried and true lure for bass, both smallmouth and largemouth is the rubber worm. They used to come in just red or black, but now they’re across the spectrum in a wide variety of rainbow colors.
These plastic worms can also look like snakes, leeches, and plain nightcrawlers to hungry bass. When it comes to bass fishing, hunger sometimes has very little to do with whether these eternally angry, always aggressive fish are going to strike or not.
Bass hit just because the presence of your lure ticks them off. That’s why they’re so much fun to catch and why something wiggling through their territory like a plastic worm sets them off.
Top 9 Fishing Tips with Worms:
1. Go Old School.
Take a cane pole, a length of braided line with a 24-inch monofilament leader, tie a #6 hook on it, crimp a split shot 12 inches above the hook. Hook a hunk of nightcrawler to it. Throw it in the water and sit back Tom Sawyer style to wait for a bite.
Or you can take the rod and reel of your choice, with 6 to 8-pound monofilament line, tie a #6 hook on it. Crimp a ¼ ounce split shot a foot or so above the hook.
Tie a bobber on the line about four feet up from the hook with a chunk of nightcrawler hooked to it. Toss the entire contraption end over end into the still water and wait for the bobber to bounce up and down.
2. Target Surface-Feeding Fish
Surface feeding fish are usually after the latest hatch, but you can hone in on the action with a clear bubble and a worm tied with a double-hook. Tie one hook to the end of your line, and another one about five inches up the line with the hooks both facing the same direction. Hook a big nightcrawler through both hooks so it pulls in straight as you retrieve your cast. A big chunk of nightcrawler on the surface may just get those trout interested in a bigger mean than a mayfly.
3. Retrieve Your Plastic Worm Differently
If you’re bass fishing “hopping” your worm, that is flicking it out of the water a foot or so, letting it sink, and then repeating as you retrieve your cast can drive an angry largemouth crazy. They’ll hit it like a freight train.
4. Dropshotting is Great
Drop shotting with a worm over heavy vegetation can entice the bass or walleye hanging out in the weeds below. Tie a weight to the end of your line, tie your hook up two or three feet with a worm on a #6 or bigger hook.
Toss out the line, jig every two cranks, just enough to make the worm rise and fall a few inches. You’ll avoid all the “salad” on your line and be able to work an entirely new section of water in the process.
5. Just Drift Away
If you’re on a mountain stream, looking for a little fun catching those buzzing, bouncing brook trout, just hooking a worm on a smaller hook, maybe a #10 or #12 with no weight attached and letting the current pull your bait under cut-banks and around boulders can get you a lot of strikes.
6. Worm harnesses and Trolling
A worm harness is a piece of high-test monofilament with a couple of hooks in line and a spinner at the point, just below the swivel connecting it to your line. Hook a worm onto the harness and troll slowly across the water. You can set the depth of the harness with a split shot if you want to go deeper. You get double duty with the spinner attracting the fish and the worm bringing them in on scent.
7. tip-ups through the Ice
Hook a mealworm on a #10 hook, hang a 1/8 ounce split shot a few inches above the hook, and lower the mealworm and sinker to a set level below the ice. Set the flag on the tip-up and repeat the process on all your legal holes in the ice. Wait for the flag and see what that little larva has brought you.
8. Add Spinners for Walleye
Worm harness with Colorado style blades for river fishing. Hook a nightcrawler on the hook assembly. The Colorado blades are slightly larger than traditional spinner blades, and make more noise in the water. Cast across the current and retrieve the harness with little jigging motions every third crank. Let the harness work back across the water.
9. Bottom Bouncing with a Slip Sinker
Slide a slip sinker on your line, then tie a #6 hook on with a nightcrawler. Put a small crimp on weight about three feet above the hook and another one about five feet up. As the slip sinker rolls along the bottom of the river or lake, it will bounce, and not get caught as often as a static weight. Let the motion of the water work for you in a slow retrieve.
