The quintessential picture of fishing is an angler sitting lakeside with a rod, reel and can of nightcrawlers.

Anglers and earthworms date back to the earliest days of using poles and lines to harvest fish to feed families and villages. Ancient anglers learned tasty creatures tempted fish to bite their hooks, and earthworms were among the easiest baits to gather and keep handy.

For thousands of years, in my simplified view of the early evolution of sustenance fishing, worms were the bait of choice. Convenient. Basic. Productive.

Ah, but the human species always leans to creativity.

By the 1600s, innovative anglers were improving fishing rods, lines and reels, and crafting lures that looked like real insects and fish. Sport fishing became a pastime and anglers pursued new ways to attract fish to their hooks with hair, feathers, wood and metal fashioned to look like insects, minnows, crustaceans, amphibians, rodents and birds.

Interestingly, however, the simple, slimy, wiggly nightcrawler proved very difficult to replicate. Nobody could figure out how to make a worm that looked, felt and undulated close enough to the real thing to be effective in teasing fish into biting.

Then, in 1949, it happened. Akron’s Nick and Cosma Creme cooked up a recipe of oils and polymers on their kitchen stove that proved to be easy to mold into a soft and lifelike form. The plastic worm was born.

Today, you cannot look in the boats of bass anglers at Mosquito, Milton, Berlin, Shenango, West Branch or anywhere in the U.S. without seeing some variation of the original Creme Worm rigged and ready. Soft plastics are as ubiquitous to bass anglers as knives are to chefs.

Again, creativity drove innovation. What began as the one-size-fits-all, reddish-brown 8-inch straight-tail worm has morphed into a thousand shapes, sizes and colors of soft plastic creations equally irresistible to fish and fishers.

After millenia of fishing without bogus wrigglers, just 75 years since plastic worms were born, we today have a dizzying assortment of soft plastic critters big and small in every color we might imagine. No bait is too tiny, too large or too gaudy. All are meant to mimic living animals that fish would eat.

Some, though, do defy logical acceptance as natural food.

First to mind in the “unbelievable” category is the cube-shaped baits popularized in Japan and spreading now in the U.S. They are bite-sized cubes of soft plastic through which strands of rubber are threaded to create a bait that looks more like the fuzzy dice one might see hanging from the rearview mirrors at a hot-rod show than a fishing lure.

Soft bait makers have developed lures with legs, tails, pinchers, claws, mouths, fins, antennae and eyes in enough variety to fill catalogs, websites and a million miles of retail store aisles. I can understand their purpose and why anglers readily buy them.

But those fuzzy dice, mysterious though they are, underscore one fact: There is no limit to the human response to finding ways to bring the world closer to our needs.

Jack Wollitz’s column is published here every weekend. Contact Jack at jackbbaaass@gmail.com.