Thread: Uncertainty surrounds Alabama's white shrimp season

http://blog.al.com/live/2011/10/unce..._alabamas.html

Uncertainty surrounds Alabama's white shrimp season
Published: Friday, October 21, 2011, 12:25 PM
By Jeff Dute


[size=8pt]Larry Scott, who operates Scott's Landing bait shop on the Mobile Bay Causeway, is concerned that he and others who are facing decisions about settlements with BP in the wake of last year's oil spill, may not have the whole picture about what's going on with shrimp, which are the basis of his business' survival. Scott, 57, said he doesn't want to sign a settlement now, then find out a couple of years down the road that he can't make a living at the shop because the spill negatively impacted shrimp populations. (Press-Register/John David Mercer)[/size]

Shrimpers' concerns over the scarcity of white shrimp prompted an unusual sampling of their numbers above the Mobile Bay Causeway this week.

Alabama Marine Resources Division shrimp biologist Craig Newton said those test drags with a shrimp net showed "pretty good numbers" for the fall crop.

"With what we found, we're definitely not throwing up any red flags with white shrimp," Newton said. "I was not disappointed with what we saw. From what we saw, shrimp are rather abundant up there. It just looks like it's going to be a later season."

Newton said calls from commercial shrimpers and those who catch them to sell as bait prompted his decision to sample in the Tensaw, Raft and Blakeley rivers on Tuesday.

He said there was no definitive way to classify what he saw in terms of normal, good or bad in comparison to past years because the area above the Causeway is rarely sampled. This was the first time he's sampled the area in the 21/2 years he's been with Marine Resources.

"We don't have a good data set above the Causeway to compare to, unlike south of the Causeway, where I have data going back to the 1980s," Newton said. "Even though we found decent concentrations of white shrimp up there, how that translates into the commercial fishery, I don't know. So far, it hasn't been a normal year."

Newton said "it's tough to say" if not being "a normal year" meant that something was wrong.

"I'm not going to say one way or the other now because we'll have to look at things like river stages, rain events and the shrimpers' trip tickets and begin putting together pieces of the puzzle," he said. "It's all going to be after the fact. I've got my fingers crossed that with this (cold) front, things will get better."

From 2002 to 2010, an average of 5 million pounds per year of white shrimp were landed in Alabama, with a low of 3.6 million pounds in 2002 and a high of 8.3 million pounds in 2006, according to National Marine Fisheries Service landings data.

The price at the dock determines how much shrimpers are paid for their catches, so while the 2002 landings had the lowest value at $8.6 million, the 6.5 million pounds landed in 2008 brought the highest price at the dock, totaling $15.7 million. Over the 10-year period, Alabama's annual white shrimp landings had an average value of $11 million.

Those totals do not include the number of pounds or value of white shrimp sold for use as fish bait.

Newton's anticipated 10-minute test drags showed that the average size of all shrimp caught was 60 to 80 per pound. A couple of times, the boat had to stop to get the net untangled from snags.

The largest shrimp averaged 16 to 20 to the pound and the smallest, 2,000 to the pound. The largest average-size shrimp caught in one drag were 60 to the pound, and came from the Tensaw River near Gravine Island.

Newton said the size variance didn't surprise him because, while there is a peak to the nearshore white shrimp spawn, it doesn't just end abruptly.

"Traditionally, there have always been females that are extremely late spawners, producing these little guys," he said.

The fall season is important to commercial shrimpers because the crop provides income to help them make it through the slim pickings available through the winter months and into late May or June, when brown shrimp season usually opens.

Bait shrimpers also benefit from a good crop of white shrimp to feed an increased demand from fishermen eager to catch their share of primarily speckled trout, but also largemouth bass, redfish, white trout and flounder.

Those fish instinctively swarm into the rivers when the water cools, and large numbers of white shrimp are falling out of shallow, grassy areas far up the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. Newton said they've been maturing in the Delta since floating in from the Gulf of Mexico as tiny post-larvae beginning about mid-June.

With water temperatures dropping behind a strong cold front that dipped nighttime air temperatures into the upper 30s in north Mobile and Baldwin counties, longtime commercial shrimper David Robicheaux said the next week could be critical in determining the season's success.

"I've been in it since 1978, and I've never seen a year like this with this little bit of production," said Robicheaux, who is the head-on shrimp sales manager at Sea Pearl Seafood in Bayou La Batre. "I don't know if it's the oil spill or Mother Nature. We've had bad years before, but this, it's not like it should be."

Robicheaux is holding out hope that the recent cold front will cool local waters and coax white shrimp in the marshes to begin leaving.

"Normally, right around when the World Series starts is when we should begin to see a bunch of white shrimp," he said. "It started (Wednesday) and we have a little cool weather, so we should start seeing something show this week or we're in trouble."

For Larry Scott, who's sold live and dead shrimp at his Scott's Landing bait shop on the Causeway, the scarcity of white shrimp and a lackluster brown shrimp season has him pondering a longer-term question.

"A lot of us are going to have to decide pretty soon what we're going to do about a settlement with BP because of the oil spill," he said. "I'm all right with settling if I know that everything's OK, and I'll be able to keep running my business and catching shrimp.

"But I'm 57 years old, and I don't want to sign something, then find out a couple of years from now that we got a problem with the shrimp because of the spill, and I have to try to find some other way to make a living."

Great read and a scary one too. I feel for the shrimpers because the bottom line is that no one knows what is going to happen in the industry for the next couple years. This article should also put other fisheries on notice a lot things could change very soon.

I KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG, WITH THE LACK OF WHITIES IN THE BAY, :wall: DURING OCT. NOT SURE WHATS GOING TO HAPPEN. TIME WILL TELL, BUT I FILL FOR THE SHRIMPERS, :bow: BAD SITUATION TO BE IN. BP SU%$. uke: uke:

hopefully its not too bad, oh and i took the yak out from scotts the other day, managed to lose my phone, but saw several shrimp fleeing fish, also saw a smaller manatee, kind of cool suprise hope bp hasnt messed us up too bad

[quote author=Peaches link=topic=152.msg1272#msg1272 date=1319414543]
hopefully its not too bad, oh and i took the yak out from scotts the other day, managed to lose my phone, but saw several shrimp fleeing fish, also saw a smaller manatee, kind of cool suprise hope bp hasnt messed us up too bad
[/quote]

Its hard to say because a lot of the issues wont arise for years. Next spring I think we will be able to get a better idea on the ecological impact. If the shrimp arnt around it could bring a larger collapse which would just suck. In better news the weather is nice today haha.

One thing that was pointed out by the local scientists watching this was the affects could be long ranging and species specific.
Because of the timing issues of the oil incursion last year it could (in theory) affect white shrimp and not brown shrimp (or visa versa).

A little off topic but in the the same genre, all along one of my big concerns has been the possible affects on the littoral benthic invertebrates (crabs, shrimp, mollusks, snails, etc.)
To my knowledge NO research has been done on the organisms that form the base of the foodchain along the Gulf beaches, the very areas MOST affected by the spill in terms of direct and lasting contact with the oil and by products.
All we have had to go by is the anecdotal observations by fishermen and beachgoers.
I have been holding my breath for a year wondering about the ghost shrimp,
but based on the number of mounds that can now be observed along the beach sandbar near the GSPPier it looks like they are doing OK. :yippee:

Hopefully all of this hand-wringing will turn out to be much ado about nothing!

Yep, Its concerning..... scary. I saw lots of shrimp 3/4 inches long along the beach at Daphne 5 weeks ago, when the BIG Ones disappeared.... went back last week,,,,, no big ones yet, dozens each cast, but only 3/4 inches long again. Each time there were dozens, and you can imanage how many went thru the net, dozens more. But stll no BIG ONES. So whats has happened to the 3/4 inch shrimp from 5 weeks ago. (A) wasn't many very wide spread. (B) dead. (C) A + B .

Why has the State of Alabama stoped there study t hat was reported on T V :violent

http://blog.gulflive.com/mississippi...mp_harves.html

[size=12pt]Mississippi Department of Marine Resources giving white shrimp harvest a closer look[/size]
Published: Saturday, October 22, 2011, 8:08 AM
By Jeff Dute The Mississippi Press


[size=8pt]FILE - Mississippi Department of Marine Resources personnel are sampling white shrimp deeper into coastal bays and estuaries than they ever have.[/size]

[size=12pt]PASCAGOULA, Mississippi --[/size] [size=10pt]Mississippi Department of Marine Resources personnel are sampling white shrimp deeper into coastal bays and estuaries than they ever have, said a DMR official.

Those efforts are intended to help answer questions and concerns voiced this week by shrimpers, who are reporting a marked decrease in the pounds of white they're catching in Mississippi Sound, said Joe Jewell, deputy director of the Office of Marine Fisheries.

"The fishermen are concerned and the regulatory agencies are concerned. "We hear what they (shrimpers) are saying and we're addressing those concerns," Jewell said.

He said DMR is monitoring areas for white shrimp it has never before tested in an effort to get a read on what kind of crop remains in the bay and estuary nursery grounds.

Preliminary results show that there is another batch of white shrimp in those bays and estuaries. Those shrimp are averaging 80 to 100 to the pound, Jewell said.

That's still above the 68 shrimp to the pound minimum for legal harvest.

"They'll need to get a little larger before they get into the Sound to be legal," Jewell said. "We're hoping for the best right now."

He noted that shrimp would not grow as fast in the cooler-water environment.

Mature white shrimp generally begin falling out of marsh nursery areas when autumn water temperatures begin dropping below 68 degrees.

Jewell said with mid-day water temperatures still hovering around 70 degrees, the stepped-up monitoring has not shown any marked increase in the number of white shrimp leaving the shallows.

If the 2011 white shrimp season turns out to be a bust, Jewell said, it could from any combination of environmental conditions.

"The best part of this white shrimp season was early, then we got into September and it just dropped off dramatically," Jewell said. "We really don't know why. Outside of the results of our scientific studies, there could be a whole list of reasons why that happened."

He listed the opening of the Bonnet Carre spillway at New Orleans this spring to alleviate severe flooding on the Mississippi River, the severe drought that followed, possible impacts from the BP oil spill and even lingering effects from Hurricane Katrina's devastation as possible contributors.

"When you have that big of an event that sprawls across the northern Gulf to Mobile Bay, you'll still have some long-term effects that we still don't know about," he said. "How all of these things interact, all of these really complex events that moved across the northern Gulf of Mexico, is something we haven't yet determined."

In the four years prior to 2011, Mississippi commercial white shrimp landings averaged 440,000 pounds a year with an annual value of about $937,000. These totals, from National Marine Fisheries Service landings data, do not include pounds of value of white shrimp caught for use as fish bait.

"Inside of each season you'll have ups and downs and the occasional lulls and over a series of years you'll have good years and bad years, but this particular year appears to be unique, though we don't know why," Jewell said. "It started off good, then slacked off and came to a dead halt. You don't often see that. [/size]