Gulf Shrimp Are Scarce This Season
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.
‘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.’
They just don’t know. Of course, there’s this:
Joris L. van der Ham, a researcher at Louisiana State University who has been studying white shrimp, said he had found more white shrimp than usual last winter in estuaries that were affected by the BP oil spill. That abundance might have been due in part, he said, to a decrease in the number of people out shrimping last year, but a significant decline in this year’s season would undercut that assumption.
While cautioning that his study is incomplete, Dr. van der Ham speculated that certain compounds in the oil may have stunted the shrimp’s growth rate, and that the large numbers he found last year might have never made it out into the gulf to spawn, thus explaining a missing generation.
‘There are numerous lines of evidence now that are sort of lining up that chronic exposure to this material could be problematic,’ said James Cowan, a professor in L.S.U.’s department of oceanography and coastal sciences.
Chronic exposure could be problematic - you think?