There are more fish out there that you can’t catch than you can catch.

Let that sink in for a minute. The statement, although hardly profound, is true at a number of levels.

• Firstly, you’re not going to catch all the fish in any given river. Perhaps in a small creek you’d be able to trick the majority of naive and opportunistic trout. In a large river? You’d struggle to cast to half of them, let alone catch a calculable percentage. That should humble you as an angler.
• More importantly, you’re pretty far from most of the fish in the sea. Some live across the country. Some live across the globe. Some swim in lands that are dangerous to travel in. Some live miles below the surface of the water. They’re going to be there, and you aren’t.
• Furthermore, there are thousands upon thousands of species that aren’t going to show any interest in your fly. For every bass out there, hundreds of fish aren’t going to give you the time of day. That should humble you as a person.

If you’re lucky, some of these fish will eat bait. Whether they be carnivorous jungle monsters or delicate reef dwellers, something real will outperform something fake. It is a difficult truth for fly fishers, I know. But it is the cold, hard truth. Worms trump Catskill dries for discerning trout – and you can extrapolate that out across the rest of the fish world.

Classes Agnatha, Chondrichthyes, andOsteichthyes – for those keeping score at home.

With one whole third of the fish world being jawless, the score is certainly in their favor. We’re moving from fly to bait to nets for the majority of the swimming things out there. They’re not going to give your woolly bugger or garlic-cheese powerbait the time of day. And, for some of them, their mouths are too small for any hook to pierce. Want an easy illustration of this principle? Head to your local pet store and think of which fly patterns, and in which sizes, you’d need to throw for some of the critters you see. Take the tiny, transparent ones for example: A 26 Griffith’s Gnat isn’t going to cut it. Not even if it is cast perfectly  on supple 7X tippet.

What’s the point of this? On one hand, it is valuable to know your place in the overall rank and file of things. Sure, you might be able to catch a keeper striper. At the same time, you can’t even catch one of those things that clings to the glass in an aquarium. (A lot of the family Loricariidae eats poop – want to mess with that bait?)

On the other hand, it should impress upon you the sheer magnitude of our world. We’re so smart. We have so much figured out regarding fish. Not only fish… but also chickens. Chickens, so that we can manipulate their breeding behaviors in order for them to grow feathers that help us catch fish. Crazy. But I digress: we can only directly impact a drop in the piscatorial bucket. We’re big, but there is more than us out there.

This might not help with your fishing. (Unless you’ve been trying to match the poop hatch for your dentist office’s plecostomus… in which case – don’t.) Hopefully it helps with your wonder. Your appreciation for the vastness and diversity of creation. How we can enjoy a sliver of it with rod and reel and fly, but that there is so much more that we can’t touch.