Pb 82 - Fishing Sinkers Ecosystem

Why isn’t fishing lead banned? :ok_man:t4::man_shrugging:t4:

Anyone who touches or eats it can become seriously poisoned, and beneath the surface in fresh water or salt water it is even more poisonous.:skull_and_crossbones: :skull_and_crossbones: :skull_and_crossbones:

Do you have any experience with fishing lead or Pb 82 \ lead in the ecosystem?

Summary

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Summary

The last island dives were not easy, there were many sandy spots under the rocky cliffs where there were more than 25 x 100g Pb per square meter.

Do you like the idea of Pb in our ecosystem?

  • yes
  • no
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At the wildlife clinic I volunteer at, we’ll occasionally get birds who’ve ingested fishing lead. It’s sad to see, and the birds sometimes don’t make it.

The problem with lead is that it’s behavior is similar to things like DDT and organochlorines-- it biomagnifies as it moves up the food chain, which is why larger organisms have such a high amount of it in their systems.

Probably because it’s easier to keep things the way they are than to ban them, and people generally prefer to take the path of least resistaince.

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There are more non toxic weights and ammunition becoming available.
Why hasn’t it been outlawed?
Money. Responsibility.
Removing what has been in the system is hard and expensive. The companies aren’t going to pull what’s there off shelves, there’s no viable plan to collect people’s “stash” and we haven’t a way to clean up what’s in the water already.
Education would help. Most people are unaware of how the lead kills us, too. Like the birds and other animals that eat lead, and drink lead poisoned water.

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some quotes from a search engine:

Lead is a naturally occurring toxic metal found in the Earth’s crust. Its widespread use has caused extensive environmental contamination, human exposure and significant public health problems globally.

WHO - Lead poisoning

Ecosystems near point sources of lead demonstrate a wide range of adverse effects including losses in biodiversity, changes in community composition, decreased growth and reproductive rates in plants and animals, and neurological effects in vertebrates .

California Air Resources Board - Lead & Health

Dissolved chemical forms of lead are extremely toxic when present in high concentrations in an aquatic environment.

PubMed - Factors controlling biological availability and toxic effects of lead in aquatic organisms

Lead (Pb) is a highly toxic metal in aquatic animals, especially in fish. The Pb exposure induces a significant bioaccumulation in specific tissues in fish. Oxidative stress, neurotoxicity, and immune alterations are caused by the Pb exposure.

ScienceDirect - Toxic effects of lead exposure on bioaccumulation, oxidative stress, neurotoxicity, and immune responses in fish: A review

As an angler I dislike lead in anything, I don’t even buy lures that have internal lead weights in case they break (eg casted off a rock) where I am (NY state) it is illegal to sell lead sinkers in sizes of 1/2 oz or smaller, and in the freshwater fishing I do here I rarely have a need for sinkers larger than half an oz anyway, (mostly I use 1/32 to 3/16 oz) When I do use 3/4 oz I buy the bigger size of the same model of tungsten sliding sinkers

I’m not a big fan of split shot just from a fishing tactics standpoint (prefer sliding sinkers), but when I use it I use tin split shot (I’m not even sure split shot is made in sizes over 1/2 oz).

Tungsten is the ideal sinker material due to it’s density and hardness, but is extremely expensive (can be over $1 per sinker) tin is slightly less dense than lead, but is used for split shot since it is soft, and split shot has to be soft to crimp onto the line, so tungsten doesn’t work, but tin does

For anyone who wants to go lead free but doesn’t want to pay for tungsten there are steel and possibly tin options for sliding sinkers too, I pay more for the tungsten sinkers because I think tungsten is the best material from an effectiveness standpoint, since it is even denser than lead (same weight in a smaller sinker, so less likely to snag or be detected by fish) lead free fishing does not have to be expensive, tin and steel sinkers work.

I woudl support banning unnecessary lead in consumer products generally, including sinkers over 1/2 oz where it is still allowed in my state

All that said, I do want to correct one thing that I think actually overstates the risk of lead:

Anyone who touches or eats it can become seriously poisoned

Touching lead sinkers is routine among anglers, at least it was before the restrictions on small ones, I’ve toutched them myself handling discarded tackle, and this does not. normally cause poisoning, as elemental lead does not absorb through skin on contact, the risk is if you don’t wash your hands well after handling them(and I mean wash, not sanitize, lead is not a germ and cannot be disinfected) and then you touch your food, that you could get traces of lead on your food and ingest it. Done repeatedly this may raise your lead levels in an unhealthy manner (I wouldn’t do it even once)

My main concern with lead is that lost sinkers are ingested by wildlife

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Most of the people I know use lead weights for halibut fishing. I wonder how much damage it can cause to a marine environment.

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Another factor I suspect is that there are groups that want to ban fishing and hunting entirely, so anglers and hunters may become concerned that bans on certain types of tackle and ammunition are part of a larger attempt to restrict fishing as much as possible.

I think limiting toxic tackle benefits the angler if done right. Avoiding lead reduces the risk that I am exposed after insufficient handwashing, or that my kid or a friends or relatives kid gets poisoned eating one of my sinkers, reduces lead in the environment and improves the ecosystem as a whole (more fish to catch).

Laws that set a future date after which sale of lead sinkers is illegal are the best way to go IMO, this way companies have time to switch to making non-lead sinkers, and there is no sudden supply shortage or economic problem.

I also think to be accepted by anglers, calls for lead regulation cannot be coming from the same people and organizations that woudl ban fishing if they could

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Lead IS being banned, in various countries, in phases of implementation, over time.

Which might lead you to another question: why isn’t fishing lead being totally banned, immediately?

Why do they always give corporations this wiggle room of years of time to eliminate various practices?

Many reasons. Shifting culture takes time. There are all kinds of hidden things that must happen in the background: different suppliers for different metals, different mines, workers in lead factories have to find new jobs, etc.

An immediate, total ban often has the reverse outcome of what’s intended: massive noncompliance.

One of the most rapid and massive changes in history is the shift to “green energy”. Fossil fuels are not illegal (yet). It’s a gradual shift that has been encouraged in many ways.

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Young kids, this may horrify you: we used to use our teeth to crush lead split shot sinkers onto the line

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I believe I know some people who still do. :grimacing:

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That will not happen in the Great Lakes Region. Fishing is a Major source of revenue.

But yes, it is also a factor of social change, some of which can be exceedingly slow.

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While yes, Lead is bad, and there are better alternatives that aren’t used (mainly for cost reasons) it’s impacts in it’s submersed metallic form are often misunderstood and sometimes exaggerated.

The biggest danger of lead is to birds, and this is well studied
The ecotoxicology of lead shot and lead fishing weights
The persistent problem of lead poisoning in birds from ammunition and fishing tackle

Lead except in the most extreme cases is not harmful to most plants growth and does not affect them the same way it affects vertebrates.

Unintuitively lead sinkers do not have as much of an effect on fish as it does birds either, since they are often not consumed and when sitting in a body of water they are fairly stable and under acidic conditions slowly degrade into forms like Lead carbonate (2PbCO3·Pb(OH)2) which are bioavailable and accumulate in tissue.
The biggest source of lead posoing in Aquatic organisms are usually from industrial activity and pollution. https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=0E-zddwQZeEC&oi=fnd&pg=PR6&dq=the+impacts+of+fishing+"lead"+pb+in+aquatic+ecosystems&ots=2DTbm5R3QF#v=onepage&q&f=false

Solid Lead metal is generally safe to handle if your skin has no cuts/abrasions and your hands are cleaned afterwards in a way that avoids any lead dust potentially interacting with your mucous membranes. That being said there is no safe level of lead exposure so it is not worth risking a speck of dust in the eye or a whiff of lead dust, so just don’t.

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Personally, right now when it comes to lead, I’m more concerned with the lead plumbing that has yet to be replaced. Poisoning ourselves will not lead to the brighter minds we need.
The wheels are turning on getting the lead out of the fishing tackle and ammunition.
The wheels need a big push to fix our drinking water supplies too.
I do realize I am speaking as a citizen of the USA and iNat is global. Globally we need to insure everyone has clean water.

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To be clear I do not expect any state in the US to ban fishing or hunting. Specific locations could be deemed protected areas as is normal in conservation law, and I could see an outside chance that a small number of states ban catch and release fishing, but statewide bans on hunting and fishing won’t happen

I’m basically saying it is important not to allow a good policy (lead limits) to be confused with a super unpopular (and bad IMO) policy that would never pass (fishing bans)

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I suppose these are the same people who want to ban foxes and ospreys.

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:grimacing:

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how can one ban an animal?

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It was a joke. I was thinking that foxes and ospreys hunt and fish, so if you ban those activities, the animals starve.

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Slightly off topic:
https://wildjustice.org.uk/lead-ammunition/phasing-out-toxic-lead-voluntarily-just-isnt-working/

It seems you can sell game meat with levels of lead in it that would be banned if it was farmed meat, and the posher British supermarkets do so.

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Near coast of Tenerife Island\ Spain, I recovered 8 sinkers today, which is unusually few for 50 minutes of diving.
When freediving, the bags of lead became so heavy (15-25kg) that we could not float them to the surface and had to empty them several times per day.
In total, this season I only brought around 120kg to the beach. But with the deep sand pockets we only see the surface. At the beginning we transported the lead on land in buckets, but that quickly became dangerous when the sinkers started to dry.
Lead oxides* formed and the lead sinkers started to produce a lot of dust. Since I don’t fish myself, I never kept a sinker again…

I advise anyone who collects Pb sinkers in salty environments to seal them airtight afterwards, e.g. in plastic bottles. Because a dusty large bucket in the car, for example, can really cause health problems…

Edited my Pb sign today:

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