Why do fish roll, never quite worked it out , I fish a venue 20+ feet deep and the fish roll over the bait, dont make sense to me any ideas.

I've always thought it was something to do with bouyancy. Maybe that they find it easier to expell unwanted gases at the surface, sort of like us farting after a heavy meal.

Cant see it being wind, would'nt there be bubbles

I've just read a thread on another forum and no one knows for sure. The one that makes sense to me is that they are cleaning debris out of their gills maybe. They seem to do it when feeding and bream shove their heads into the floor and stir up all kinds of stuff when doing so. Maybe it it irritates their gills. Who knows?

or maybe they do it...............................................




..........................................cause... ..........





.................................................. ........................they .................................................. ........

............CAN !!!!!!!!! .............?????????????

I am going to come down very heavily on the side of Dunney's "no one knows for sure". I certainly don't.

All I would say that rolling fish are active fish, and therefore more likely to be feeding. Bream ( and tench) seem to feed as a shoal, and when they roll they often seem to do that as a shoal too. Maybe there is a link. But they don't always roll when feeding.

For what it's worth here's some more on this subject.

I fished the Shannon a few years ago, the swims were heavily prebaited and well off the beaten track. Access for 3 anglers was quite tight but manageable.

Time being at a premium we used a echo sounder to find a few features and came across a drop off. A lot of bait was put in here, if I remember rightly, over four days we used 6 sacks of crumb a few gallons of casters, the same of maggots and most of the pallets of corn and beans we'd taken over with us.

The fishing was slow to start with, but at around 4 in the afternoon we saw 1 Bream roll over our feed. Quickly followed by alot of it's Brothers and Sisters. From that point on the fishing was no less than incredible. Feeders heavily laden with bait would not make it to the bottom in some 18ft of water. Fish averaging between 41/2lbs to 5lbs every single chuck. The Bream continued to roll as we fished on. We missed our evening meals to reap the benefits of our prebaiting. Huge bags of fish.

The same happened for four consecutive days at which point we'd had enough and spent the rest of the break in the pub.

There must be something in it.

I've seen huge shoals of fish next to anglers (again using a sounder) but they have really struggled.

I've looked for a more definitive line on this for some time on the Internet but can't seem to find anything.

I'd like to think that it's a sign of feeding fish, something definitely not to be ignored. You'll see most carp anglers cast to where fish are rolling. There has to be a particular reason why they do it?

I'd also read a theory about fish trying to correct swim bladders that become out of sync? Maybe that's the case.

I don't have your persistence DN. But on a large lake once I spotted bream rolling well to the right, maybe a couple of hundred yards away. But they were heading my way, continuously rolling. Didn't have your quantities of bait either but what I had was a sort of bright yellow crumb that could be moulded into balls having the consistency, and size, of cricket balls. Weird stuff, each crumb being so sharp it hurt the fingers to mix the bait. Threw in a few dozen of those and waited. The bream continued rolling and getting nearer, eventually stopping over the bait balls, but still rolling. I imagined them chiselling away at the balls, playing football with them, for they would have been more or less impossible for the fish to break up. A sample ball, dropped into the margins had scarcely changed by the next morning!
Results were a bream a cast, all exactly the same size, maybe 3 1/2 pounds each. They continued to roll but I gave up after about 40 or 50 fish. Had enough already. How did you have the resolve to go back 4 days running?

I don't know whether the rolling was linked to feeding, but if nothing else it revealed where they were. I would have cast to rolling carp too. Bit daft to aim 50 yards left of fish you can see.
I have very rarely seen barbel rolling, just the very odd fish, never a shoal all doing the same thing. So we cannot assume that barbel roll for the same reasons as do carp, tench or bream.

Originally Posted by JayZS

How did you have the resolve to go back 4 days running?

Well it was a fishing holiday. The times we weren't fishing in the first few days we were knocking the crumb up. Prebaiting from a boat is the way to go A pretty thankless task but well worth the effort.

Sounds the most feasible explanation , but why just bream, carp and tench ? do they have a different internal structure , or is it because they are bottom feeders or filter feeders ?