Whether you think it's unsportsmanlike or not, the practice of chumming is changing giant trevally behavior in the Kiritimati lagoon.

How do we know?

Affixing a tracking tag to a Kiritimati GT

A group of us spent three weeks over the course of two years studying giant trevally on Kiritimati and we are actively lobbying the government to ban the practice. Anglers that have fished the island a hell of a lot longer than the lodges chumming the flats every day can attest to the days when shots at big trevally were a common occurrence on the flats. Since the advent of chumming those encounters are now  fewer and far between. The science is clear, chumming is having an effect on the behavior of the giant trevally in the lagoon.

So stories like this one in the Wall St. Journal or this one from the NY Times do a disservice to anglers that choose to target trevally on the flats without chumming.

If you really want to have your ass kicked by a giant trevally on Kiritimati you should consider getting out into the blue water with some decent conventional tackle. An encounter with a giant trevally on the outside with a top water plug or swim bait will trump your lagoon caught fly rod GT every day of the week.