Cold Winter Weather Causes Summertime Fishing Woes

From Walmart to mom-and-pop shops, stores are running out of nightcrawlers, frustrating anglers and retailers alike.

July 14, 2014

NEW YORK – A worm shortage (yes, worms) is causing out of stock situations at Walmart to corner stores, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Nightcrawlers, a popular bait with freshwater anglers in the United States, have been hard to come by for some retailers at the height of the summer fishing season. The cause of the worm shortage: cold weather in Canada. In Ontario, nightcrawlers are handpicked in the wild and shipped south by the millions. The newspaper notes that the long winter delayed the picking from March to May, and then a dry May kept the worms burrowed underground.

To cope, some retailers have raised prices, others have held the line, and some say that they’ve seen little change in supply or price.

Stewart's Shops, a convenience store chain in New York state and Vermont, has run out of nightcrawlers at some of its 290 stores that sell the worms, frustrating anglers, a spokeswoman told the newspaper.

"Yes, we have no worms," Stewart's President Gary Dake wrote on Twitter before the Fourth of July weekend, which is peak fishing time. "Who knew nightcrawler harvesting was affected by weather?"

The U.S. annually imports more than $20 million in live worms from Canada, according the U.S. Commerce Department.

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