food for thought

Hello TFF folks. I'm just back from a fishing trip in Northern Minnesota. One of guys in our group caught an 8 lb lake trout in Clearwater Lake. When we were cleaning it we pulled 2 tube jigs and a big artificial worm out of it's stomach. From the look of them they had probably been in there for years. They had lost all their color except for some of the sparkles that are embedded in them. The hooks and line dissolved but not the bodies.

Have any of seen that before? I'm guessing the fish is probably not good to eat. Too bad, it was a beauty of a fish.

I'm wondering if these types of artificial lures might be causing a lot of fish like this problems. Any info or opinions on this?

Thanks and good fishing!

Boy that's a good one. I have caught a lot of fish with hooks in them and don't recall any ill effects from eating them. I have also shot deer who have had arrows in them and have found that the body encapsulates the foreign object and ate those with nothing bad happening either. Of course you need to cut away and discard the affected tissue, which in this case was a front shoulder. But I digress. Whether or not the plastic itself would affect the safety of eating the fish is a smidge above my pay grade. Maybe Blue has something to add here. Personally...I'd eat it. Can't be much worse than the mercury that's in there already!

Thanks George. You are probably right, can't be worse than the mercury :).

1. It obviously didn't kill the fish...

2. I've bitten the heads off of thousands of soft plastics over the years when they got too torn up to hold the hook shank. So far the only ill effect I've noticed is that I keep getting older.

Seriously, it does raise an interesting question but I think we're going to need a polymer chemist to answer it. Just the fact that they were still intact in the stomach of that lake trout suggests that the base material is more or less inert, but perhaps there's something harmful in the colorants.