Live Bait: Which One to Use, How to Hook It and Keep It Alive

Live bait is any bait still alive on the hook: worms, minnows, leeches, crawfish, crickets and, in salt water, shrimp. For most freshwater fishing, buy a box of nightcrawlers or a scoop of minnows. Hook it so it keeps kicking and keep it cool. Check the rules before you carry it from one lake to the next. That’s most of the game.

One gallon of water keeps 12 to 24 small to medium minnows alive. Crowd more in and you’re paying for dead bait.

Which live bait should you use?

Use what the fish already eats where you’re fishing. A worm works on nearly everything, so it’s the safe first buy. Minnows are the pick when the fish you want eats other fish. The rest are for a certain fish or a certain kind of water.

This is the short list, with the hook and the rig for each. Hook sizes run backwards, so a size 6 is smaller than a size 2. The hook size chart shows what they look like.

If you’re not sure, ask at the bait shop nearest the water. They know what’s biting this week, and they’ll often show you how to hook it.

The fishing bait page has the full bait-by-fish chart, with cut and prepared bait next to the live stuff. For crappie fishing and walleye fishing, the minnow is the main event, and the minnows page goes through the kinds.

The fathead minnow, one of the bait minnows on New York’s list of fish shops may sell. Illustration: Duane Raver, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (public domain).

How do you hook live bait so it stays alive?

A live bait only works while it’s alive. So hook it lightly, in a spot that doesn’t kill it, and leave the point clear. Use the thinnest hook that will hold the fish. Sutton’s advice for minnows holds for all of them: a fine-wire hook hurts the bait less than a heavy one.

• Minnows: through both lips, from the bottom up. That’s the best way overall for a bait you cast or move. For a minnow that hangs still under a bobber, go through the back, just behind the top fin. Skip the eye. It’s more likely to kill the minnow.
• Nightcrawlers: pin a small worm, or thread on a piece of a big one. On a whole crawler, go through the head end, the shorter side of the band. It holds better there.
• Leeches: right through the middle of the big sucker.
• Crawfish: through the lower edge of the tail, with the hook point facing up.
• Hellgrammites: once under the collar, just behind the head.
• Live shrimp: through the head, under the horn and in front of the dark spot. For a jig, go through the tail.
• A live bluegill, where it’s legal: a 3 to 5 in fish on a 2/0 baitholder hook, through the back just ahead of the top fin. It’s a bait for flathead catfish, pike and muskies.

Then size the hook to the bait. Sutton’s crappie numbers are a good guide: No. 6 to No. 4 for small minnows, No. 3 to No. 1 for medium ones, up to 1/0 or 2/0 for big ones.

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Which rig should you use with live bait?

The simplest rig is the best one to start. “The best gear is the simplest,” Bass Pro says: a hook and a sinker under a bobber. Here’s when to switch to something else.

A split shot is a small round weight you pinch onto the line. The fishing weights page has the other shapes, and the fishing terms page explains the rest of the words.

The sliding sinker is built like a Carolina rig. The weight rides on the main line above a swivel. The bait swims on the leader below it. In salt water from a pier or a beach, the fish-finder rig does the same job.

Give the bait room to swim. A minnow pinned under a heavy sinker doesn’t look like dinner. It looks like it’s stuck.

What about live bait in salt water?

Start with live shrimp. In the Gulf, as Robert Sloan of Salt Water Sportsman puts it, “everything eats shrimp.” Free-line one around a jetty. Sloan pinches one split shot about a foot above the hook, just heavy enough to take the shrimp down to the fish. Or hook it through the tail on a 1/8 to 1/4 oz jig.

Three more are worth knowing.

• Killifish, also sold as mud minnows or mummichogs. They live in fresh, brackish and salt water. In salt, Outdoor Life’s Joe Cermele says to put one on a jighead for flounder, redfish, seatrout and stripers. They don’t need a bucket of water. Keep them in a cooler on soaked newspaper over ice, so their gills stay moist.
• Sand fleas, the small sand crabs of Gulf and Atlantic beaches. Run the hook through the rear of the shell and fish it on the bottom with a bank sinker. Pompano, flounder, drum and croakers eat them.
• Croakers, sold by the dozen at Texas bait camps from about June through October. Sloan calls a live croaker over a reef, at the jetties or in the surf “an absolute killer for trout and reds.” Rig it on a No. 3 to No. 6 Kahle hook and an 18 in fluorocarbon leader.

Flounder are suckers for finger mullet and mud minnows, Sloan says. Fish them on a Carolina rig, because flounder bite softly and slowly.

Stripers along the coast want bigger bait: a live menhaden, also called bunker, or a live eel. The striper fishing page covers when and where those work.

How do you keep live bait alive?

Bait dies from heat, from running out of air and from bad water. Each bait has one number that matters most. Here they are.

Minnows are the hardest, so here’s more on them. Use water without chlorine. If all you have is tap water, let it stand overnight first. Change the temperature slowly. Sutton says a bag of minnows set on ice “may be full of belly-up bait in minutes.” Heat kills them as fast as cold. A little ice in the water on a warm day is fine, says John Woods of Mississippi Sportsman.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine gives two more rules. Keep the bait bucket within 10 degrees of the water the bait came from. And every few hours in warm weather, swap about a third of the water.

Minnows per bucket, from the rule of 12 to 24 small to medium minnows per gallon. Chart: fishing.info.

Leeches are easy if you don’t fuss. Keep them in lake water or well water, in the fridge. Treat tap water with a dechlorinator first. Don’t feed them. In-Fisherman calls feeding “the worst thing you can do.”

Crawlers want it cold. Turn the box over every few days. On the water, set the box on blocks of ice in a cooler, not on ice cubes. With cubes, In-Fisherman says, the crawlers escape into the water.

Crawfish are the trap. They seem like water animals, so people fill the bucket. Missouri’s advice is an inch or two of water and plenty of tall grass. In standing water, crawfish use up the oxygen and suffocate.

Can you take live bait home, or to another lake?

Often you can’t. Bait carries diseases and invaders from one water to the next. So states limit where it goes after you’re done. Here are five, quoted from each state’s own rules.

These are only five states, and rules change. Read your own state’s bait page once a year, before the first trip. Worms, leeches and insects are generally still legal to use in Wisconsin, even where the minnow rules are strict.

What do you do with the leftovers?

Put them in the trash. “Dispose of unwanted bait in the trash,” Minnesota says, and “It is illegal to release bait into Minnesota lakes and rivers.” Dumping a bucket of minnows feels kind. It’s how invaders spread. Or keep the bait cold and use it next weekend. That’s cheaper anyway.

Is live bait better than a lure?

Not always. Florida’s TrophyCatch program logged 168 bass of 13 pounds or more, and 53 percent came on lures and 47 percent on natural bait. At the very top, that’s close to a coin toss.

Bait wins when fish are cold, deep or won’t chase. It sits still, smells right and moves on its own. A lure wins when you need to find the fish, because you can cover far more water with it. The bass bait page shows which lures copy which live bait, so you can switch without changing what the fish sees.

The risk with live bait is a deep hook. Wait too long and the fish may swallow bait and hook, Bass Pro’s Gerald Almy warns. In a Texas test on bass, fish hooked in the throat died at 48 percent, and the kind of bait made no difference. If you plan to let fish go, keep the slack out and set the hook early. A circle hook cut deep hooking in half in an Illinois test on bass, but it also landed only half as many fish.

Where do you get live bait?

The bait shop closest to the water is the best place, because the bait is fresh and so is the advice. Call ahead for minnows, leeches or live shrimp, above all on a holiday weekend. Some parks even have a live bait vending machine, like this one in Michigan.

A live bait vending machine at Brighton Recreation Area, Michigan. Photo: Dwight Burdette, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0, cropped).

You can catch a lot of it yourself. Crawlers come out on a lawn at night after rain. Crawfish hide under rocks in creeks. Hellgrammites live under rocks in fast water. Minnows go in a trap or a seine. Check your state’s rules first, because catching bait has its own limits. In Missouri, for one, a bait trap must be checked at least once every 24 hours.

Pick the bait the fish wants, not the cheapest. For catfish, the best catfish bait page sorts live, cut and punch bait by the three big catfish.

What kills live bait fastest?

These five mistakes waste the most bait.

1. A full bucket. Stay at 12 to 24 minnows a gallon. Overcrowding stresses them and kills them, Sutton says.
2. Tap water straight from the hose. Minnows and leeches want water without chlorine. Let it stand overnight, or use a dechlorinator.
3. Sudden heat or cold. Mix the water slowly when you change it. Keep the bucket in the shade.
4. Crawfish under water. Use an inch or two of water and wet grass, not a full bucket.
5. A hook in the wrong place. Go through the lips, the tail, the collar or the sucker. Through the eye, a minnow is more likely to die.

Get those five right and you’ll throw away far less bait. If a word on this page was new, the fishing terms page explains it.

Free PDF · 16 pages

Stop guessing. Know what's biting before your first cast

A whole Saturday on the water with nothing to show for it. One reading tells you who's feeding.

The Water Temperature Fishing Chart. Take one water temperature reading, find it on the chart, and see which of 26 freshwater fish are spawning, feeding hard or slowing down.

• Where bass, crappie, bluegill and walleye sit, and what to throw. Trout: the reading where you stop.
• Why a 3 ft drop beats a cold front, and what to throw each day of the front
• The three thermometer mistakes that make a reading lie

The chart's numbers come from state fish and wildlife agencies and fisheries research: 61 sources, each listed on the site.

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