As live bait goes, it’s hard to beat crawfish for trout, bass, catfish, and more—yet they are wildly underused. That’s because it’s rare to find them for sale in bait shops. There are no commercial ...

Clockwise, from top left: minnow, crayfish, sunfish, shad, frog, and grasshopper. Fathead minnows, leeches and worms are mainstays in bait-shop refrigerators across the country. These old standards ...

Like most anglers of my generation, I started my fishing career using live bait. My first catch was a brook trout that gobbled a garden worm on a long-ago first day of trout season. And while my first ...

I was right for the most part, but it turned out that instead of fishing for bass like he usually does, Wesley and a friend of his were catching crawfish. The owner of the mariner where they launched ...