Empty Nets June 2014 | Page 20

Say NO to Shrimping

Shrimping has always been a cornerstone of fishing in the United States. It has also played a large role in the development of southern states such as Louisiana that have a large shrimping culture and is a multi generation tradition. For decades, shrimp have been caught by tossing a shrimp net off of a boat or dock into shallow water. However modern shrimpers are having to use new techniques to keep up with popular demand as well as the receding line of shrimp colonies into deeper ocean.

Within the past few years, shrimp fishers are having more and more trouble finding shrimp colonies in the shallow waters of rivers and just off the coast in the gulf of mexico. And with rising demand for shrimp cocktails and shrimp cakes, fishers needed to adapt. The traditional toss net has become severely out of date so commercial fishers switched to newer means of catching the shrimp.

In popular shimping spots like the coast around the gulf of mexico, shrimp are becoming more and more rare. Fishers used to be able to stand on the end of a dock and drag a net along a leg of the peir and end up with a net full of shrimp to being home and cook for dinner14. Now, that is not the case, fishers are having to move out towards deeper and deeper water to find the shrimp because the shallow water shrimp have almost been fished to extinction. Instead of people taking the disappearance of shallow water shrimp as a warning, fishers decided to just move into deeper and deeper water to find more shrimp, and eventually, fish those colonies to extinction as well.

Today, commercial fishers use deep sea trawlers to catch massive amounts of shrimp. The trawlers usually drag three enormous nets behind them that scrape along the seabed catching the shrimp that are resting in the seabed2. This new form of fishing allows fishers to catch hundreds of shrimp in a matter of hours. This gives shrimpers the bigger yields they are looking for to meet the extremely high demand that today’s fish market has created.

Shrimp Trawler Boat

"Shrimping

is responsible for a third of the world's bycatch, while producing only 2% of all seafood."

-Save Our Seas Foundation

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