THE BETTER BAIT

Innovation For Your Benefit

In early 2020, Clare Machine Works, Synergy Seafoods Limited and Université Sainte-Anne, collectively began an evaluation of a synthetic crustacean bait for the lobster fishery, the findings of which could provide a breakthrough to eliminate the need to catch wild fish for use as lobster bait in Canada.

Worldwide, some 40 billion pounds of wild fish are caught every year to use as bait for catching crustaceans – leading to regional baitfish collapses, endangering a key component of the food chain, and resulting in millions of unintended incidents of by-catch and environmental damage from net fishing methods. With crabs, crayfish, and lobster fisheries combined, the global bait market is currently estimated at some $20 billion per annum.

Using an environmentally neutral blend of naturally occurring biochemicals found in wild fish baits and plant proteins that attracts lobsters and other crustaceans, the Better Bait product provides many advantages over traditional wild caught species, namely:

– eliminates the waste and biological complexities of harvesting one species to catch another

– elimination of costly frozen storage

– resource allocation to other tasks due to no longer handling barrels of fish required to bait the traps

“With our industry experience and the resources of the Université Sainte-Anne’s Marine Research Centre, we are in a unique position to evaluate innovative and effective solutions to benefit the lobster fisheries,” said Vince Stuart, president of Clare Machine Works. “Exploring and ensuring safe alternative baits, as well as finding ways of releasing and stretching bait further, can offer both consumer and environmental confidence leading to fishery success.”