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• Take your litter home
• If you find fishing line, don’t just ignore it, pick it up and dispose of it properly. Line should be burned, not put in the rubbish bin where it can cause birds and animals problems at the disposal site.
• Always return stones and boulders, as you found them. Not only will this increase your chances of finding crabs next time, it will allow the fauna and flora found on and under the stone to flourish, which again increases the attractiveness of the area to your sought after bait.
• When digging, always backfill your holes. This needn’t be extra work, the spoil from the hole being dug, can backfill the previous hole.
• Don’t disturb birds and other wildlife unnecessarily, whilst you are there for pleasure, they are there for their livelihood.
• When checking to see whether a crab is a peeler, the books say, pull off the last portion of one of the legs to see if a soft new skin is exposed, indicating that this is a peeler crab. Forget the books, please, use this only as a last resort. Better is to think about their life cycle and only check the crabs that could be peelers at that time of year, for instance a large male is not going to moult in the middle of summer and an egg bound female is not going to moult until after the eggs have hatched, so leave them alone (see the biology section for more detail), Check the texture or shade of the top shell, is it dull or shiny, if its dull it could be a peeler, can you see any signs of the top-shell cracking or is there any give in the shell when you press it? The best areas to press are natural joins, such as the upper and lower parts of the shell. All these are signs to look for before resorting to pulling limbs off crabs! Please only remove limbs as a last resort!
• Crabs often hide under seaweed, when lifting the weed to check, do it carefully so as not to damage the anchorage of the plant, this is a haven not only for crabs but for other creatures too and helps make the habitat one in which you can go looking for bait.
• If you can avoid stepping on rocks covered in life forms, please do so. So often anglers are seen taking a two second short cut over a weed-covered rock, instead of sticking to the sand that surrounds it. Forget the falling and injuring yourself nonsense, your laziness is needlessly helping deplete the areas fish resources through removing their habitat and feeding areas. When seaweeds lose their rooting and drift away, this opens the area up to grazers such as limpets, which actively keep an area of rock clean. Next time you are at the shore, check this out, where a limpet sets up home, not a lot else is able to grow, giving low biological productivity to the area and having nothing to attract crabs or fish. So don’t just look after the environment, look after your fishing!
• When digging worms, a lot of anglers see the masses of casts high up on the beach and start digging, in the hope of getting lots of worms. Please, think about the biology of the species, these are the nursery areas of young worms, tomorrow’s bait and breeding population, please respect these areas and leave them alone, to protect your future, the bigger worms you need are found lower on the beach at the lower limits of the tidal range.
  
  *Whilst this list is by no means exhaustive, if everyone followed these guidelines, the biodiversity of our shoreline would increase and make our bait gathering areas and fishing spots more productive.