Blue Fox company offers spinning lures with lots of spotted blades under the mark Vibrax Hot Pepper.

Other producers of spinning lures use the same or similar design patterns.

For decades, these patterns are considered as classic: the effectiveness of them is taken for granted, not qualified or verified. However, direct comparisons in the field of spinning lures with spotted blades and plain blades do not confirm clearly this banality.

An objective of tests described below was to compare these lures using schooling perch, Perca fluviatilis, in the capacity of test objects.

Spinning lures of two types, Vibrax Hot Pepper #1 with black-yellow ring spots on silver blades (SYB) and silver Vibrax Original without spots (S), were compared in the field.

At each estimated locality of perch, 20 presentations (cast and retrieving) of lures were made: 5 with SYB, 5 with S, 5 with SYB and 5 with S. Then an experimentator moved to the other locality, where 20 presentations of the compared lures were made in the reverse order. In total, 220 lure presentatations per 1 day were made, 43 perch were included in the calculation (see Table, null and equal results for SYB and S lures were canceled).

For comparison, the number of landed perch were group per each 10 lure presentations (180 lure presentations were included in the calculation).

Vibrax Original #1 silver blade without spots	Vibrax Hot Pepper #1 silver blade with black spots
2	3
1	3
3	2
4	3
1	2
3	4
1	3
2	1
2	3
Total number of landed perch 19	Total number of landed perch 24
Mean number per 10 lure presentations 2,11	Mean number per 10 lure presentations 2,67

Lures had the same brass cores with slver bells

Perch were released. Some landed and released Northern pike, Esox lucius, were no included in the calculation.

At the first glance, it seems that lures with spotted blades are slightly more effective (on an average, 2,67 perch per 10 lure presentations) than lures with plain blades (2,11 perch). However, an estimation of mean difference with the assistance of Student’s t-test does not confirm this hypothesis (n₁ = 9, n₂ = 9, k =16, t ... Read more »