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<\/a>Bloodworm \u201cdiggers\u201d along the Atlantic coast, from Maine to the Canadian Maritimes, harvest the worms from coastal mudflats and sell them to bait dealers. Photo by Robert F. Bukaty\/AP Photo<\/p><\/div>\n
Back at Harrington\u2019s, a bearded man in a hoodie readies the worms for shipping, much as they have been prepped for almost a century. He methodically dumps 250 or so worms onto a screen, shakes off the excess ocean water, nestles the glistening worms on a bed of seaweed, and then covers the lot with newspaper. The seaweed, called wormweed\u2014a subtype of the relatively common brown alga Ascophyllum nodosum<\/em>, also known as rockweed or knotted wrack\u2014acts like lightweight packing peanuts. Depending on their destination, the worms will be unpacked less than 24 hours later and sold as live bait in fishing shops throughout the United States. But it\u2019s what happens to the wormweed that has marine biologists concerned\u2014a tradition for the old-school industry appears to be creating liability for coastal communities on the receiving end.<\/p>\n Once a week for three consecutive weeks in the summer of 2011, FedEx delivered boxes of bloodworms to the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Maryland. Amy Fowler, a marine biologist who was then a postdoctoral researcher at the center and is now an assistant professor at George Mason University in Virginia, arranged the orders. Her goal was to see what role the bloodworm bait trade had in introducing invasive species from Maine to the mid-Atlantic region and elsewhere. When the deliveries arrived, she and her team prepped the samples for study, but it was largely up to Fowler to extricate the worms. \u201cEverybody was a little \u2026 not super excited about handling the worms,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n In addition to boxes from five different dealers, Fowler sampled five field sites along the coast of Maine, collecting wormweed from the shore. She inspected bait boxes at distributors in five mid-Atlantic states, and had an intern purchase smaller bags of worms and wormweed from bait shops, just as an angler would. The variety provided a way to compare samples from four points on the supply chain.<\/p>\n Fowler\u2019s team then inventoried everything, removing all the hitchhikers, the species that clung to the worms and the wormweed. Then, they looked at species abundance and diversity in all of the samples, a meticulous and time-consuming process that revealed a microscopic world of substantial proportions: wormweed housed insects, mites, snails, and isopods. Fowler\u2019s 2016 paper that resulted from the study\u2014\u201cOpening Pandora\u2019s bait box<\/a>\u201d\u2014reported an astounding 17,798 live organisms, collected from the field sites, 30 wholesale boxes, and 150 retail bags. A bag of worms and seaweed may not seem like much, but the cumulative effect is mind-boggling. Since 1946, Fowler estimates that bait dealers have unintentionally shipped some 1.2 billion organisms.<\/p>\n A variety of species, from periwinkles to amphipods, \u201chitchhike\u201d on wormweed, the seaweed commonly used to pack bait worms. Photos courtesy of Amy Fowler<\/span><\/p>\n The study was significant, not only because it showed that the conditions keeping worms alive also kept a lot of other things alive, but also because it clearly showed the vector\u2014the mechanism that moves organisms from one place to another. For most invasive species, vectors can be exceedingly difficult to pinpoint. For instance, container ships moving from busy port to busy port discharge billions of tonnes of ballast water, dispersing countless organisms multiple times at multiple locations over prolonged periods. The bait trade is comparatively small, and the vector more precise\u2014a relatively straight line from source (bloodworm harvesters and dealers) to recipients (bait shops and anglers), and potentially into the ocean if wormweed is disposed of in the sea.<\/p>\n The simple act of surviving, however, doesn\u2019t necessarily mean an organism will result in a problem. As Fowler saw it, the fate of many hitchhikers in the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem, near the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, remained unknown. But three problem species almost certainly were introduced on both coasts by the bait trade: wormweed itself, which has the potential to spread and has taken hold in parts of the Chesapeake Bay and also in San Francisco Bay; snails commonly known as periwinkles that have physically altered habitat, reduced biodiversity in the intertidal zones, and displaced other animals; and the notorious green crab, an invasive species originally from the Baltic and northeast Atlantic that has damaged fisheries, decimated juvenile shellfish populations, and destroyed eelgrass beds, marsh grasses, and other habitats globally. Multiple federal, state, and local officials now monitor these aquatic invasives and attempt to control their populations.<\/p>\n \u201cFor such a kind of homegrown and niche vector, something that\u2019s so small,\u201d Fowler says, \u201c[wormweed] still has a really large impact in terms of moving organisms around.\u201d The cumulative economic losses from invasive species can be significant, particularly in terms of reducing valuable shellfish harvests. In a 2018 study, Fowler and her colleagues suggested that inadvertently shipping green crabs, for instance, could result in monetary losses to the shellfish industry totaling as much as $752-million.<\/p>\n Back at Harrington\u2019s, I watch an employee pack a traditional bait box\u2014bloodworms packed on seaweed\u2014for US customers. That day, he and the other employees had also prepared trays of bloodworms, stacked 10 high and placed in polystyrene boxes, all bound for Europe. Inside each tray, the only living organisms: moist bloodworms. Shipping without seaweed reduces shipping costs, and worms overnighted to Europe apparently disembark none the worse for wear.<\/p>\n Despite difficulty in definitively calculating the total ecological toll of shipping wormweed out of Maine, the practice troubled researchers, who saw an easy fix: just stop packing worms in wormweed.<\/p>\n In an effort to come up with solutions to prevent the spread of invasives\u2014including the simple suggestion that dealers could knock off about 85 percent of the hitchhikers by rinsing wormweed in fresh water, an idea Fowler and her colleagues tested\u2014Fowler realized that wormweed has little or no effect on the survivorship of the worms. The seaweed seemed superfluous.<\/p>\n Emboldened by her work and evidence from several dealers, Fowler felt optimistic. She would talk with dealers; it wasn\u2019t like she was trying to convince the global shipping industry to fundamentally change how ships discharge ballast water. And no one had to reinvent the wheel. The bait industry had already shown that worms could be shipped \u201cnaked in trays\u201d as Fowler wrote in a 2018 paper. But, she says, \u201cWe just need to have them do that for all of the worms that are shipped throughout the US, right?\u201d<\/p>\n
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