The types of fishing lures sort into six families, and every lure on a tackle-shop wall belongs to one of them: jigs and bottom rigs, soft plastics, crankbaits and jerkbaits, topwater, spinnerbaits and inline spinners, and swimbaits and glide baits. Each family is an answer to one question, where is the fish and what is it eating, and each has a depth, a speed and a water temperature it was made for. A jig crawls on the bottom in cold water like a crayfish; a spinnerbait runs through the middle of the water column in spring like a fleeing shad; a frog walks over a grass mat in August like a frog. Learn the six and the wall reads as a season. Below: the table, what each family does, the season that sorts them, and how the winning anglers of 2025 chose among them.
Six families, six answers to one question: where is the fish, and what does it want to eat today?
The six families
| Family | Imitates | Moves | Depth | Water temperature | Hook | Reference lures |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jigs and bottom rigs (jig, Texas rig, Carolina rig, Ned rig, drop shot, shaky head) | Crayfish, worms, bottom baitfish | Dragged, hopped, shaken on the bottom | 1–40 ft (0.3–12 m) | 40–90 °F (4–32 °C); the cold-water family | Single, weedless or exposed | Strike King Tour Grade jig, Z-Man Finesse TRD, Gary Yamamoto Senko |
| Soft plastics (worms, craws, creature baits, tubes, flukes, stick baits) | Anything: worms, crayfish, baitfish, lizards | Depends on the rig; falls, swims, twitches | Any | 50–90 °F (10–32 °C) | Single, usually a worm hook | Creme worm (1949), Zoom Super Fluke, Zoom Brush Hog |
| Crankbaits and jerkbaits (squarebill, medium and deep divers, lipless, jerkbait) | Baitfish, crayfish | Wobbles on a straight retrieve; jerkbaits twitch and pause | 0–25 ft (0–8 m) by lip | 38–80 °F (3–27 °C); jerkbaits coldest | Two or three trebles | Rapala Original Floater (1936), Rat-L-Trap, Strike King KVD 1.5, Megabass Vision 110 |
| Topwater (poppers, walking baits, prop baits, frogs, buzzbaits) | Wounded baitfish, frogs, insects | On the surface: pops, walks, plops, buzzes | Surface | 65–90 °F (18–32 °C) | Trebles; frogs two upturned singles | Heddon Zara Spook (1939), Rebel Pop-R, Whopper Plopper, SPRO Bronzeye Frog |
| Spinnerbaits and inline spinners (spinnerbait, buzzbait, Rooster Tail, Mepps, Panther Martin) | Baitfish, and flash and thump for their own sake | Straight retrieve, blades spinning | 1–15 ft (0.3–5 m) | 50–80 °F (10–27 °C) | Single skirted, or a treble on spinners | Mepps Aglia (1938), Rooster Tail, Strike King spinnerbaits, Lunker Lure buzzbait |
| Swimbaits and glide baits (paddle-tail soft swimbaits, hard glide baits, segmented swimbaits) | One big baitfish: a trout, a gizzard shad, a bluegill | Swims or glides in a wide S | 1–30 ft (0.3–9 m) | 45–80 °F (7–27 °C) | Single jig head, or trebles on hard baits | Keitech Swing Impact, Huddleston Deluxe, River2Sea S-Waver |
A seventh category, spoons and blade baits, metal lures that flutter and vibrate, belongs with the jigs for how they are fished: vertically, in cold water, for bass, walleye and trout.
What each family does
Jigs and bottom rigs are the family for fish on the bottom, and the family that catches the biggest bass in the coldest water; the jigs and rigs hub explains the six jig types and the four rigs, each with its weight table.
Soft plastics are the material rather than the lure: a bag of worms becomes a Texas rig, a wacky rig, a drop-shot bait or a jig trailer depending on the hook. Nick Creme molded the first plastic worm in Akron in 1949 and sold it by mail from 1951; the soft plastics hub covers the families and the rigs.
Crankbaits and jerkbaits are the moving baits with lips, and the lip sets the depth: square and short for 0–5 ft, long and round for 20 ft. Lipless crankbaits sink and rattle; jerkbaits suspend and are the bait for water under 50 °F. Lauri Rapala carved the first floating minnow from cork in 1936; the crankbaits hub has the depth classes.
Topwater is the family that is fun to watch: poppers chug, walking baits zigzag, prop baits churn, frogs walk over the mat, and the strike is a hole in the water. Warm water, low light; the topwater hub sorts the five types and their seasons.
Spinnerbaits and inline spinners catch fish by flash and vibration, which is why they work in stained water and wind; the spinnerbait’s wire arm makes it the moving bait for wood and grass. The spinnerbaits hub explains the blades.
Swimbaits and glide baits imitate one big meal and are thrown for the biggest fish in the lake, on rods rated for ounces rather than fractions; the soft plastics hub covers the soft ones, and the swimbaits and glide baits pages go deep.
The season sorts them
Kevin VanDam’s six-season model in Bassmaster puts the families in order by water temperature, and it is the most useful single fact about lures: below 48 °F (9 °C), jigs, jerkbaits, blade baits and spoons, fished slowly on deep structure; 48–55 °F pre-spawn, crankbaits and slow-rolled spinnerbaits on the edges of the flats; 55–70 °F spawn, soft plastics and jigs pitched to beds and cover; 70–75 °F post-spawn, topwater and spinnerbaits high in the water; summer above 75 °F, deep crankbaits, big worms and Carolina rigs on structure, frogs over grass, topwater at dawn; fall, spinnerbaits and crankbaits as bass chase shad into the creeks. A tackle box organized by family is a tackle box organized by month.
What the pros picked in 2025
The tackle lists from the nine 2025 Bassmaster Elite Series events, reported by Bassmaster, show every family winning somewhere: a jig at St. Johns River in January, a deep crankbait at Okeechobee in February, Texas-rigged plastics at the Pasquotank in April, a football jig at Lake Fork in May, a bladed jig at Tenkiller in June, a swimbait on a jig head at St. Clair in August, a frog and a soft jerkbait on the Mississippi in August. No family won twice in a row, and no winner fished one lure all week. The best bass lures page has the event-by-event table, and the best fishing lures page turns the families into a short list to buy first. The lures hub is the map of the whole section. Every lure and rig named here has a one-line definition under lures, baits and rigs in the fishing terms.