Mind Where You Toss Your Trash

Campaign Warns Anglers That Live Bait Worm Trade Carries Invasive Species

As the summer fishing season arrives, many recreational anglers will try to land their favored game fish using a special kind of bait: live blood worms. Wholesalers in Maine ship the slimy, wiggly creatures across the United States packed in locally harvested seaweed to keep them alive in transit.

While fishers in many states welcome the worms’ arrival, most don’t realize that, if we handle this packaging carelessly, the seaweed may introduce unwelcome alien invaders that can disrupt coastal waters far from Maine. A helpful solution: fishers should dispose of this seaweed in the trash, not by dropping into the Chesapeake Bay or other local waterways.

Hidden in the seaweed (a type of algae known as wormweed) are live animals not native to other states where the shipments go. These species — such as European green crabs, snails (rough periwinkles), and mites — are already suspected of spreading in California after being transported there through the live bait trade. Once established in a new environment, invasive species can create a nuisance, change the local ecosystem, and harm local fisheries.

Recreational anglers use the blood worms to catch prized fish like striped bass, croaker, and drum. A single worm sells for about a dollar, a price willingly paid by fishers who say they work better than artificial lures.

Though a close friend of mine directed a lot of work on this at SERC, I must confess to being a bit of a doubting Thomas on this. The species carried on the "wormweed" are native to the waters only a little farther north of the Bay by oceanic scale differences. Clearly there is no real geographic barrier preventing them from entering the Bay, only the fact that the organisms probably are not well suited to our warmer, less saline, waters, or able to compete with our own equivalent species.

In global warming thinking, organisms are grouped into zones by temperature, raising global temperatures is thought to force the species farther north to maintain their preferred temperature range. Surely, it's not always that simple, factors other than temperature can affect the range of species, but it is a useful paradigm. It flies in the face that colder water species will suddenly take a liking to the warmer waters here and become a problem.

At the same time, how big a hassle is it to throw away the weed rather than toss it in the Bay.

BTW, although bloodworms are a truly excellent bait, the modern "paste on fabric" substitutes like Fishbites work really well in most cases, and don't rot and stink to high heaven when they sit in your tackle bag for a couple of years. . .