The lakes I fish are full of Horn Pout ( AKA cat fish), I'm sure bass eat them, but I don't think I've ever seen lures with colors, patterns ,shapes, to mimic them.

 I wonder why?

                        Jim

Oh they're out there. Mattlures makes a great catfish imitation swimbait. Gitzit makes a nice madtom imitation too. I believe someone on here had a good picture of a bass that had eaten a catfish right before they caught them as well.

 

I hadn't seen those. Around here horn pout are mostly black with off white bellys. You would think black colored crank and jerk baits would work well.

With that prickly locking dorsal fin, I would imagine that bulheads (that's what we called them in Minnesota and Wisconsin) are near the bottom of the bass feeding preference list.

I too am wondering about the dorsals. How's a bass get around that? Even the small ones can mess you up if you're not careful.

 Bass, instinctively, regularly feed on the most abundant forage in their environment. Matching the hatch lends itself to that fact. That's not to say they won't eat a frog, rat, bullhead, or whatever, sometimes because the opportunity presents itself and other times due to lack of an abundance of 'normal' forage (shad, minnows, bluegill, crawfish).

A good indication of that kind of fishery is catching bass with big mouths and undersized bodies.

As for bass eating them without getting 'spined', they do the same thing they do when eating craws. They kill it before swallowing and in the case of catfish, they will then swallow them headfirst.