Soft Plastics: Both Friend and Foe

We all know that soft-plastic baits catch lots of fish, and because of that soft texture, they readily rip and tear up while anglers fish them. At the end of a long day on the water, it's nothing unusual to have gone through multiple packages of them.

One of the problems associated with these plastic baits is that many anglers at least sometimes and perhaps more times than not toss the remnants overboard. The unfortunate reality of this kind of disposal is that it litters our lakes and rivers, but more importantly, can cause problems for the fish that swim there.

As biologists have well-documented, most of these soft plastics don't break down in the water or the digestive system of popular species, such as largemouth and smallmouth bass, pike, and walleye. Those that the fish don't ultimately scoop up are thus left to sit on the bottom for weeks...or even years. (FYI: One notable exception is the Berkley Gulp soft plastics, which are designed to quickly decompose.)

Once a fish's digestive system gets blocked, a typical response is that you end up with a "skinny" fish. For example, I read about a situation in which a pond owner called a biologist about a 21-inch bass that weighed less than 3 pounds when it should have weighed more than 5 pounds. Meanwhile, the relative weights of all the other bass in that owner's pond were normal. It was agreed that the pond owner would ship the skinny fish to the biologist for autopsy, to find out if there was an obvious problem. If not, it would be forwarded to a pathologist to check for diseases.

The first thing the biologist did was to open the gut cavity with a fillet knife and see what was going on inside the fish. When the stomach rolled out, it was packed tight with four soft-plastic baits (right), in varying degrees of digestion, effectively blocking the digestive system.

It wasn't that this bass couldn't eat. The stomach certainly could handle more volume. But with the digestive system blocked, it couldn't digest and pass any of its natural food. Consequently, the bass had been starving to death.

All of its organs looked pretty good. Its liver was normal color, with a moderately low number of grubs. Its heart was fine. Kidneys were a little distended-looking. Its swim bladder was much larger than normal, taking up considerable room in the gut cavity, but that was probably because the fish was in survival mode and struggling to maintain its equilibrium, plus it had been in an ice chest for 24 hours.

Bottom line: There was only one reason this particular fish was so thin. It had lost almost 50 percent of its body weight because it couldn't digest food.

And there was one other pertinent fact: There wasn't a single hook anywhere inside the fish...just four plastic baits. All those baits had started off as watermelon color but had turned a funky green inside the fish.

We all know its impossible to keep from losing a few soft-plastic baits when we're fishing. Bass notoriously pull a few of them off hooks from time to time. However, we should refrain from arbitrarily throwing them overboard.

Instead, let's all be responsible and take a few minutes to clean up after ourselves. Be good stewards of our water resources.

I also invite you to check out this link to see what Bassmaster had to say on this topic back in 2012: https://www.bassmaster.com/news/dont-discard-soft-plastics-they-can-kill/#:~:text=Bass%20that%20swallow%20soft%20plastic,number%20of%20discarded%20soft%20plastics.