Gulf Shrimp Are Scarce This Season; Answers, Too! NYTimes.com

[sce56]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/us/gulf-shrimp-are-scarce-this-season.html?_r=2&hp



LAFITTE, La. — The dock at Bundy’s Seafood is quiet, the trucks are empty and a crew a fraction of the normal size sits around a table waiting for something to do. But the most telling indicator that something is wrong is the smell. It smells perfectly fine.

William Widmer for The New York Times

Workers waiting for freshly caught shrimp to be weighed at D&C Seafood in Venice, La. More Photos “There’s no shrimp,” explained Grant Bundy, 38. The dock should smell like a place where 10,000 pounds of shrimp a day are bought off the boats. Not this year. In all of September, Bundy’s Seafood bought around 41,000 pounds.

White shrimp season began in late August, and two months in, the shrimpers here say it is a bad one, if not the worst in memory. It is bad not just in spots but all over southeastern Louisiana, said Jules Nunez, 78, calling it the worst season he had seen since he began shrimping in 1950. Some fishermen said their catches were off by 80 percent or more. “A lot of people say it’s this, it’s that, it’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s BP,” Mr. Nunez said. “We just don’t know.” There is plenty that is not known. Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has not compiled landings data for the season, so at this point it is hard to measure with any certainty the degree to which it is abnormal.

Even if the reports of a dismal season prove true, any forensic work is complicated by the oddities of this year’s weather, with a severe drought in the states along the Gulf of Mexico interrupted by spring flooding on the Mississippi River that brought millions of gallons of fresh water into the marshes. In addition, white shrimp crops have fluctuated over the decades for various reasons. (A BP spokesman said in a statement that some preliminary sampling indicated that the 2011 white shrimp population was within the historical range of variability.)

[aquart]

1. We are wrecking our food sources one by one.

To keep the one percent wreathed in privilege?

[sce56]

2. I said it last summer the Gulf is DEAD!

It will be a long time before it recovers if ever.

[hatrack]

3. Let's see . . . shrimp are bottom feeders, and the oil ended up on the bottom . . .

Thanks to the miracle of Corexit, that is.

Now, could there be a connection somewhere here?

[shanti]

4. yummy

:eyes: