Are Soft Plastic Lures Environmental Concerns For Our Fisheries
I am sure
we all have
seen those
discarded
soft plastic
lures left
behind in the
water. Or
maybe we
hooked
something
big only to reel in a small log with a plastic bait stuck to it. I will admit I have in the past tossed my older beat up plastic lure back in the water in favor of a new bait (I will just say sorry now). So I set out to talk about how bad these lost or discarded lures can be to our fisheries. I set out to prove this, but I found something very different. Turns out it's not what I thought it would be.
So in my research I found that the idea that soft plastic lures being an environmental concern for our Fisheries is not really as big of a problem as you might think. It seems some studies have been done that suggest there are not as many of our discarded soft plastic lures around as you might think. A lake in Charleston was studied for this very concern. The shoreline water was snorkeled to see how much could be found. Their findings were the following, for every 100 meters anywhere from 0 to 8 lures were found in the water. Another find was that of about 80 soft plastic lures were found every 50 miles or for every 1.6 miles only 1 lure was found. On the other side there are claims that more than 10 tons of soft Plastics are discarded or lost annually. They even say that more than likely every