Why blame the bait Diggers??

[mick.p]

It's always to easy to blame diggers for the vanishing/shrinking worms, but i don't think it has anything to do with them.

OK constant digging in one area will reduce the stock beds to an all time low and make finding the worms harder, but i don't think it has anything to do with the worms being small.

The reason a say this is. I live close to three rivers, each river use to produce some very good biggish Lug worm almost anywhere you choose to dig.
Some of the worm beds were very good and the worms all very big.
As the years pass, all of these rivers have lost the big worms and some places there are no worms to be found.

We can't blame the bait diggers as over the last 10-12 years, some of the spots have not seen a bait diggers fork, yet the worms still remain none existent or if there are any, they are still very small, in-fact they are getting smaller each year.

So what's the reason for the lack of growth? where have the big worms gone?
IMHO, blaming the diggers is wrong, there has to another reason for the shrinkage.

[Steinbeisser]

I would hazard an informed guess that the reduction in worm populations is the result of EU Legislation, which mandated the Member States (including the UK) to install Primary, Secondary and Tertiary treatment of their sewage effluent 2000-2005. Therefore, with aerobic digestion treatment of the domestic sewage, etc. there is less food for the worms to feed on in the sea. Some (in fact the majority) of places, just discharged their raw sewage straight into the sea or even a river estuary, if it was large enough and tidal.

Not so good for the worms and filter feeders, but a lot better for swimming in, more Blue Flag Beaches, etc!!

Steinbeisser

[dabcatcher]

hartlepool had some of the best beds for black lug on the northeast coast and a few hundred a tide was normal.

intresting though was all the areas that held the most worms were around the end of sewage outfalls.

over the years as the council cleaned up there act and these pipes became redundant and efluent is now liquidised and pumped miles out to sea we have no blacks at all.

of the 6 beds i can remember all now have no worms except for a few small ones on the very biggest tides.

also we always had a healthy year round supply of lug on all our beaches. we now have none at all.

this decline wasnt slow it literally happened with 2 years of the sewage stopping.

pro diggers are though totally decimating our local rag beds with vast areas in many locations getting trenched out daily to supply the shops by people looking for a bit of beer or backy money.

its been mentioned in a few threads on the northeast forum about the shops having loads of good quality local dug rag. where did they think it was coming from?

i once told a good freind, [tackleshop ower] where i,d got the quality worm i was useing in a local comp. for the next few weeks he actually drove a team of lads to the spot so they could supply his shop every day until it wasnt financially worth his while.

a guy i knew spent all summer supplying the local shop with rag, cheap. then complained when winter came and even he had to buy bait becase there wasnt enough left to dig

i have nothing against the odd peson selling a few bits to fuel his sport. i do it myself. but to totally destroy bait beds then move onto the next is upsetting because it takes them a long time to recover from such intensive digging taking every single worm.

i still dig my own and have little pockets i can visit to get enough for a couple of sessions but keep them quiet.

[philtherod]

I think this might be a case of genetics...if diggers have taken the big worms, and left what appear to be the small immature worms, then the diggers have removed the genes that produce the desirable big worms, and left the wimp worms, which were probably adult, and not immature, and thus all the worms subsequently bred were small. I believe a similar problem is affecting the teign and exe estuaries in S. Devon, where for years the big flounders were targeted by the speciment hunters, taken back alive to club H.Q. for weighing, and released into the local estuary, thus diluting the gene pool that produces the big fish. Why weren't these fish weighed on the river bank? The usual answer was that portable scales aren't accurate enough (complete bo££ocks of course).
You could try seeding the area with some big worms from elsewhere, when hybrid vigour might solve the problem, but don't tell anyone, or they'll get dug, sure as eggs are eggs!

philtherod

[dabcatcher]

our beds do get a chance to start and recover over the summer months when worms too far out in the mud spawn and travel closer inshore. but come the autumn and the whiting arrive and theres a constant supply needed then they get hammered. usually by the new year theres very little left.

i dont think that 50ft of mud getting cleaned out will effect stocks because theres vast areas of mud we cang get to under shallow water that will re populate .....

given the chance.