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[swimmingwiththefishes]

http://www.theprovince.com/technology/Ocean+waste+hits+home+Plastic+filled+fish+guts+ruins/10827599/story.html

[wizard]

Earlier in this season I caught a steelhead with similiar looking red chunk of hard plastic in it's stomach, too big for it to pass.

[sbc hris]

Interesting. Years ago I caught a steelhead with a loonie sized piece of purple wax in its stomach.

[cutthroat22]

Some interesting comments on the article.  Thanks Rod and Chris for chiming in and clearing a few things up.

[cammer]

It's from in river most likely, the color of the plastics still indicates dye meaning stomach acids haven't gotten to them yet,   if from ocean digestive juices would have worked on plastic

[cammer]

Check out you tube,, search Worlds greediest summer steelhead, good insight into this topic

[Dave]

It's from in river most likely, the color of the plastics still indicates dye meaning stomach acids haven't gotten to them yet,   if from ocean digestive juices would have worked on plastic

Good point regarding stomach acids Cammer … guess it would depend on the components of the plastic itself and, for the fish, where and when it consumed it.  If it ate this stuff weeks before stomach and intestine functionality break down, and when hormones put all into gonad production (freshwater entry),  I would think this fish would not have been able to digest or pass any real food, and most likely would not have survived to be caught.
My guess is somewhere in the estuary, or just offshore but not long before it hit freshwater.

[firebird]

It was a hatchery fish ... it might not have had all its marbles 

[Dave]

It was a hatchery fish ... it might not have had all its marbles 

LOL!!!

[Dave]

Check out you tube,, search Worlds greediest summer steelhead, good insight into this topic

Is the video you mean?
http://youtu.be/BvzojOJ_llg

if so, I question much of it, especially as we see it has already been opened and never see the stomach being dissected ... just sayin'

[fishstick]

It's from in river most likely, the color of the plastics still indicates dye meaning stomach acids haven't gotten to them yet,   if from ocean digestive juices would have worked on plastic

Stomach acids have a very mild effect on most common plastics from what I understand... Often showing very little if any effect even after 30 day submersion exposure. This would lead me to believe that the plastic was likely not from the river.

Not an expert here... Just a little research online. A plastics chemical resistance chart from www.plasticsintl.com.

[cammer]

the dyes in the plastic would most likely faded if from ocean,,,,,and that fishin the video is the one,,,and yes thats totally real

[fishstick]

the dyes in the plastic would most likely faded if from ocean,,,,,and that fishin the video is the one,,,and yes thats totally real

Don't know how you would know that the "dyes" would most likely have faded... Do you have any info that would point to that?

[fishstick]

This is a pic of the plastic right after opening the stomach...

[StillAqua]

Assuming the photos are real (this is the internet after all  ) and that the steelie is not a one-off freak of nature with an eating disorder, I'm inclined to think the plastics were ingested in the river (Fraser and Vedder). I can imagine how a large flat plastic piece fluttering in the current might resemble a small fish and trigger a strike response from a steelie.
 
But in the open ocean, the plastics are just passively floating around and bear little resemblance to a prey item. Every foreign object I've ever found in an ocean salmon has been a lure designed to look and act like prey. The few scientific studies I've read on ocean plastic pollution have also found relatively few plastics in salmon stomachs at sea and most were small particles likely ingested incidentally (Davis et al 2009, Boerger et al 2010).

If it was a wild fish, I don't see that steelie surviving after spawning with a gut full of plastic. If true that the plastics were eaten in the river and it's a common steelhead response to eat them, I can see river plastic pollution having a major impact on wild steelhead survival and production in many urban rivers.