The Perfect Excuse for a Slow Day: How a 90-Year-Old Study Took Apart a Pike Fishing Myth
The Story Every Pike Angler Has Heard
Every angler has a favorite explanation for a bad day. The wind was wrong. The pressure dropped. The fish were “off.”
For pike anglers, one explanation has survived for generations. Sometime in late summer, the story goes, pike shed their teeth. Their gums get sore, like a teething child’s, and they stop feeding until the new set grows in. Muskie anglers tell the same tale, sometimes down to the week — one angling writer of the early 1900s placed it around the middle of August.
I have heard versions of it on boat ramps, in tackle shops and on forums. More recently, it has drifted into winter: pike, some anglers now say, lose their teeth in February.
Why the Myth Was So Convincing
The story works because it explains something real. Summer pike fishing often does get harder. Fish that hammered lures in May can feel impossible to catch by August.
It also has a convenient feature: it puts the blame on the fish. If the pike can’t bite, nobody has to question the spot, the lure, the timing or the angler.
That made it especially useful for one group. Back in 1935, two Michigan researchers suggested that fishing guides had done a lot to keep the idea alive, because it gave them an excellent explanation for clients who went home with an empty cooler.
Two Scientists Decided to Check
Milton Trautman and Carl Hubbs, working for the Michigan Department of Conservation and the University of Michigan, did something the myth had never required: they went and looked.
They examined the teeth of 188 northern pike, along with a small number of muskellunge and chain pickerel, collected across ten months of the year. They dissected jaws to see how teeth were replaced. They checked stomachs to see whether summer pike were actually eating. And they looked at the gums the myth was built on.
What They Actually Found
Pike do lose teeth — but not the way the story claims.
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The large teeth along the lower jaw are lost and replaced one at a time, each in its own small section of the jaw, with new teeth waiting in line behind it. At any moment some are working and some are growing in, so a healthy pike always has a functional set. The researchers found no season when that balance changed in any important way.
Summer pike were eating, too. Fish caught in July and August had about as much food in their stomachs as fish from cooler months.
And the famous red, “sore” gums? In the few fish examined immediately after capture, the gums looked normal at first. The redness showed up afterward, from small blood vessels breaking during the fight and from contact with hooks and lures — most of all around teeth that were still growing in. That, the researchers concluded, is probably where anglers got the idea that the gums were sore in the first place.
Where the Study Falls Short
It would be easy to turn this into a neat “myth busted” story, but the study has real limits, and they are worth stating honestly.
It looked at fish from Michigan waters nearly a century ago. Its detailed counts focused on the big lower-jaw teeth, not every tooth in the mouth. It never sampled February or December, so it does not directly test the newer winter version of the myth. And the authors themselves admitted they had not completely ruled out sore gums.
What the study does offer is something the myth never had: actual counts, from actual fish, across most of the year.
What I See on the Water
I see gaps in pike jaws and soft new teeth all the time when unhooking fish, and I notice them most in late spring and early summer. It would be easy to build a seasonal theory around that. The 1935 counts are a useful reminder that what I notice may say more about when I am looking closely than about what the fish are doing.
I see red gums too, mostly in the warmer months and almost always after a hard fight or a lure pressing against the jaw — exactly the situation the researchers described.
And in July and August, I still catch pike that slam fast spinnerbaits, topwaters and jerkbaits. Slow summer days are real. Warm water, oxygen and plenty of natural food can all make pike harder to catch. A mouthful of missing teeth is not what’s stopping them.
Why Fishing Myths Survive
The pike tooth story is a good example of how most fishing myths last. They rarely survive because someone proved them. They survive because they are simple, they explain a real frustration, and they let everyone off the hook after a long day on the water.
The 1935 study didn’t make summer pike easier to catch. What it did was remove a comfortable excuse — and leave anglers with better questions about what really changes when the water warms up.
The Full Picture
If you want to go deeper — where pike actually carry their teeth, how many have really been counted, what the popular “700 teeth” figure is based on, and what it all means for leaders and safe handling — I put together a complete breakdown of northern pike teeth at Master Fishing Guide.
