Shrimp Suck
The next time your waiter brings a pound of shrimp to the table, imagine him dumping 30 pounds of finfish on your table. Why 30? For every pound of shrimp you eat, 30 pounds of other ocean creatures die as bycatch. Yep, you just killed 30 pounds of fin fish.
How is this waste possible? Most shrimp is caught with one of the most destructive fishing techniques known to man… trawling. Trawling involves weighted nets drug across the ocean bottom, which destroy coral and other fish habitat and suck up every sea creature in it’s path. Those creatures are dumped on the deck of a trawler. The shrimp are then picked out one by one and the rest of the catch, most of which is dead, is thrown overboard to the gulls and fish.
This industry destroys other fisheries for both recreational and commercial fishermen. Trawling also uses so much fuel, that with the recent increases in diesel prices, most shrimpers can hardly afford to pull their nets.
So what can you do? You can learn more at shirmpsuck.org and make every effort to buy farm raised shrimp.
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September 6th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
rob,
thanks for the heads up…i had no idea the numbers were that high. man, one of my favorite foods!
mitch
September 6th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
It’s pure waste here in the states, where seasons and catches are restricted. An insane amount of the shrimp we eat come from other countries. Think about how bad it is in countries with less regulation!
It’s a shame cause shrimp taste goooood! Still you can buy farm raised.
September 8th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Farm raised has it`s own set of particularly nasty problems (salmonella, antibiotics, bacteria, parasites, and chemical residues, etc.). There really is no sustainable option other than to catch your own, with your bare hands.
October 5th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
I read a snippet article in Los Angeles magazine explaining what happens to all the road kill in LA county. It gets picked up, thrown into a silo and the used to feed farmed fish. No joke!
April 28th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Numbers are a little off base. If you want to eat shrimp, ask for domestic, wild or farm raised.
http://www.oceanconservancy.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ftf_retailers_roundtable
May 2nd, 2009 at 3:45 pm
The numbers vary with fishery. From a wikipedia article…
“They found discard rates as high as 20 pounds for every pound of shrimp, with a world average of 5.7 pounds”
More:
The highest rates of incidental catch of non-target species is associated with shrimp trawling.
Despite the use of bycatch reduction devices, the shrimp fishery in the Gulf of Mexico removes about 25-45 million red snapper annually as bycatch, nearly one half the amount taken in directed recreational and commercial snapper fisheries.
Another sampling of the same fishery found, over a two year period, that rock shrimp amounted to only 10 percent of the total catch weight
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bycatch