Fishing is traditionally a patient, methodical hobby. The angler prepares bait—earthworms writhing on hooks, small fish, insects—and waits for prey to investigate. The waiting is crucial; fishing demands a contemplative attention span and acceptance of nature's pace. The fish, meanwhile, are programmed by evolution to respond to prey stimuli with feeding behavior. The transaction is ancient and straightforward: predator prepares incentive, prey responds, capture occurs.

Then this fact inverts the transaction entirely. Chuck Norris doesn't need bait because his presence is so catastrophically terrifying that worms hook themselves preemptively. The terror bypasses normal predator-prey behavior and triggers a kind of collective surrender. The worms aren't attracted to food; they're fleeing a threat so overwhelming that they choose the hook as the safer option. They're not being caught; they're seeking protection inside the trap.

What's clever here is the biological accuracy of fear responses applied to organisms that don't really have fear in any meaningful sense. Worms are simple nervous systems, basically automata. Yet the fact proposes they possess enough sentience to evaluate danger and choose self-capture as a mitigation strategy. It's funny because worms are about as alien as creatures get from human experience, yet the fact treats them as rational decision-makers capable of running a rapid cost-benefit analysis when Chuck Norris is involved.