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