The People Traveling the World in Search of the Smallest Fish They Can Reel In
While you might think fishing is all about catching the biggest fish possible and using it as a dating profile picture–or, at the very least, posting it on Instagram)--there’s an emerging group of fishermen who think just the opposite. It’s not about how big the fish is. Instead, it’s about variety. And there’s no better way to catch unique fish than by reeling in the smallest organisms that’ll bite.
They’re called micro-fishermen, and they are part fishermen, part amateur biologists, and while they still post their photos on social media, they confine themselves more to Facebook groups than anything else.
The Art of Microfishing, a Facebook group with over 10,000 members, and a corresponding blog, is run by Edward Johnson, a 50 year old currently living in Sydney, Australia. Johnson says he started both in September 2021, but he may have always been a micro-fisherman. “At the age of 4, I would catch tiny sunfish for my aquarium,” he says.