I fish northern Michigan and I've gathered that down south topwater snakes produce monsters. Up here we only have gardner snakes, which I've never seen enter the water. They're pretty rare at that. I guess my question is, will the fish strike a snake out of instinct, even though it may never have seen one before?

The thing that provoked this was that lizard up here are extremely rare but the fish go crazy over a Zoom Lizard. Ideas?

Bass are oppurtunitc feeders, they will eat anything they think they can eat.  I live near Rodman Pool in Florida and in the newspaper a guy caught a bass and filleted it to eat.  He decided to examine the stomach contents and he pulled out something that resembled a bat.  Turns out it was a flying squirrel that missed its mark in a tree and was ate.

I checked on the net and Michigan has many different species of snakes, including water snakes.  There is also one venomous snake in Michigan.  Its the eastern Massasuga rattlesnake.

You are dealing with a creature that feeds on instinct much more than on what it has "learned"

With this in mind, snakes might be great up there BECAUSE they haven't seen them.

All the bass knows it that it meets the criteria.

A. fits in it's mouth

B. Is alive

C. Is slow enough to catch w/o expending much energy

I think it's definitely worth a try.  Kind of like using a shad lure in a pond with no shad in it.  It'll still catch a bass.

Yeah I'd give it a try. I fish with a guy in Southern Michigan and he sometimes uses a snake type lure with good results.

Yeah i too think it would work and my personally spin in this is a snake lure looks very similar to worm lures anyhow, plus with that extra tail action they sure should want to eat that critter