Since several thousand tilapia were stocked into a pond near my house last May, I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the species as a whole.

They spawn constantly, eat like whales and grow like weeds. They also have thick, white flesh, which makes them great with French fries and hush puppies.

They might very well be the perfect fish - if they weren’t such an absolute pain to catch.

Because they’re raised in hatcheries and fed mostly floating pellet food, tilapia like to feed along the surface - and to have any success catching them, you have to fish along the surface.

You also have to match their preferred food perfectly, or they’ll turn up their noses like a house cat that’s already been fed.

I had gone six weeks without catching one, and I was ready to give up until Monday when a new idea hit me.

I’ve been feeding the tilapia big slices of loaf bread. I just tear the slices in three or four pieces and throw them out onto the water where the fish can pluck them off the surface.

Then, for some reason, I was using small pieces of rolled-up bread or “dough balls” on my hook for bait. Naturally, they were consuming the bread on the surface and ignoring my bait.

Finally it hit me that I should be using the same pieces of bread for bait that the fish were taking off the surface. So I put a big piece of bread on the hook and caught a fish right away that weighed 1 pound, 13 ounces.

Since then, I’ve caught a 2-0, 1-11, a 1-8 and four fish that weighed right around 1-0. I even caught one of the solid white tilapia that had teased and taunted me for months.

It just goes to show that if humans put all of their time, effort and resources into the process, they will eventually outsmart fish with brains the size of a pea.