> It’s estimated that fish caught specifically for bait in Atlantic Canada and New England in the United States amounts to hundreds of millions of kilograms, but the catch is poorly tracked.
hundreds of millions of kilograms. mind boggling. What a waste of life and food.
It's even worse if you read about the overall effectiveness of lobster traps...
...I thought this was better-studied, but I can only find the one article sourced via wikipedia, so perhaps this isn't as certain as I've made it out to be, but traditional lobster traps are apparently so ineffective that the majority of lobsters that interact with them (to get at the bait!) handily escape. [0] From the lobster's perspective, maybe it's not a waste -- lobsters are fed by those kindly humans and their strange wooden boxes, and the slowest among them are eventually lifted into the heavens to an unknown fate.
> As much as mackerel, herring, and other forage fishes underpin fishing in the northwest Atlantic, they serve an equally important role in marine ecosystems. Forage fish are part of the base of the ocean’s energy pyramid, consuming tiny creatures like copepods and, in turn, being consumed by humpback whales, puffins, and a whole host of other species.
> Bait use has altered that food chain, with mackerel and herring turning lobsters, which would normally eat sea urchins and other bottom-dwellers, into fish eaters. Scientists have even hypothesized that because wily lobsters are so good at snagging a meal out of traps without being caught, the intensive use of bait can result in a larger lobster population than would exist otherwise. Yet until very recently, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) did not track the volume of bait being caught. Many lobster and crab fishers have licenses to catch their own mackerel and herring, and the magnitude of that catch was not quantified. Much of the commercial catch for these species, which is measured, also goes to bait.
The only thing that's wasted is the resources and effort humans spend in the process of doing the catching, the rest is the circle... the circle of life.
hundreds of millions of kilograms. mind boggling. What a waste of life and food.