I'm enjoying all of your responses, thankyou :)

My post was pretty tounge in cheek because I think a lot of fishing related marketing is simply made up, but the topic of fishing seeing color has always fascinated me.

When I was in 7th grade, I set out to determine if trout could see color or not. I read some various articles and books about the topic (which were mostly over my head) and I did an experiment. The experiment went something like this...

My mom drove me down to the Fillmore fish hatchery after we talked to them on the phone. They gave me 5 rainbow trout for my experiment. We put the trout in a cooler with lots of ice as they recommended. When we got to the house, all of the trout looked to be completely dead, floating upside down.

After about 20 minutes in the tank though, they all magically came back to life (phew). The hatchery had given me a nice supply of purina trout chow so I commenced taking care of these trout in an 80 gallon tank on the side of the house.

For the experiment I would put different color ping pong balls in the water. For certain colors, I would feed them. For other colors I wouldn't feed them. I'd try to track their behavior, like if they got excited and went by the ping pong balls or not. Ok ok, it wasn't the best experiment but it was 7th grade so cut me some slack :)

The results of the experiment were inconclusive but I did learn a few things about hatchery trout. For one, they grow REALLY fast. I only had the trout a few months and they grew about 2 inches. The other thing about hatchery trout is that they are prolific waste producers, I mean if you knew how much trout pooped... you'd be shocked.

Anyway, I do believe that fish can see color. Mountainbass' book had a much better experiment than mine and things like that make me believe. I also think that lure color can be very important... sometimes. Spotted bass especially seem picky about color, but largemouth can be picky too. I'm not a huge fan of red as a lure color in general but imitating red gills with something never seem like a bad idea. My best thought about color is that that the colors a fish prefers to eat have a lot to do with what color food that fish has eaten in the recent past. Fish 'get smart' pretty quick when food is involved and by in large they're a hungry bunch.