rode out after a myth, only to find the world had changed.
The sea stopped giving in the 1980s. Catches flattened worldwide. There were, in fact, only so many shrimp in the sea. And
because of overfishing for half a century, the average shrimp size
caught in the Gulf had shrunk from “ 50” to “ 75.”
There was also growing dismay that shrimpers wasted more
than they caught. Down below, in the channel made famous by
Union Admiral Farragut’s cry, “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed
ahead,” was a kind of “fishing” that was nothing short of
marine clearcutting.
In the gold-rush days, before Joe and Mike were born,
shrimpers killed ten pounds of sea life for every pound of harvested shrimp—waste that reached one billion pounds a year in
the Gulf. Once called “trash,” now called “by-catch,” this sea life
included sea turtles driven to the brink of extinction, and juvenile
red snapper, a good eating fish. Under environmental regulations requiring escape hatches in nets, the by-catch-to-shrimp
ratio has been reduced to four-to-one, still a startling sight when
the Skinners dumped their twin nets on deck. Using grain shovels, they transferred this squirming pile into a large wooden box
of seawater mixed with Cargil Boat and Boil salt. The shrimp
sank to the bottom, and the by-catch, mostly dead, floated to the
surface. This they skimmed and threw overboard.
Gulf shrimpers, the last cowboys of the sea, were corralled in
2006 when the U.S. government, trying to balance the Gulf’s
ecosystem with a sustainable supply of shrimp for a viable commercial fishery, capped the federal-waters shrimp fleet at twenty-seven hundred boats, down from a gold-rush high of seventy-five
hundred, and ordered federal clerks to be randomly stationed
aboard to record by-catch. The goal was a “maximum sustainable
yield,” roughly 110 million pounds a year, which left 22 billion
shrimp to reproduce, according to modeling by Dr. Jim Nance,
head of the NOAA Fisheries Service Galveston Laboratory. This
figure was half the natural shrimp population before the arrival of
the trawl, estimated Bill Hogarth, the former head of the agency.
The Skinners grossed $1,000 on opening day—not a bad
haul, I thought, until I learned that it was half the price they got
when they were teenagers. They made a living but not a killing
selling their shrimp to their father, who ran a roadside stand
on Dauphin Island. “The last few years, we’re just paying for
fuel,” said Joe, sitting below their federal license framed on
the Masonite wall of their boat’s dinette. “If it weren’t for the
shop . . . ” His voice trailed o=.
What really ended the Skinners’ dreams, what really brought
shrimpers to their knees and tears in Mobile Bay, Brownsville,
New Orleans, Biloxi, and Bayou la Batre—all along the Gulf
Coast—was not regulation or lack of shrimp but good old global
supply and demand. “Because of imported, farmed shrimp from
the Far East,” said Joe Skinner, “wholesale shrimp prices in the
U.S. are the same as when Dad started thirty years ago.”
The story of farmed shrimp begins with a Japanese dish
called “dancing shrimp,” a casserole that arrives at your table
with the unmistakable sound of something inside striking the
cover. Jumping about on a bed of hot rice are Kuruma prawns—
live. The object is to grab one between chopsticks and pop it wiggling into your mouth. Kuruma, large, meaty shrimp found in
limited quantities in the Sea of Japan, sell for a hundred dollars a
pound. Seventy-five years ago this rarity prompted an ichthyology
student at Tokyo University to try growing Kuruma in captivity.
Until 1933, when Motosaku Fujinaga first spawned and
hatched shrimp in a lab, aquaculture had been an ancient artisanal practice. Tides swept fish and shrimp into estuaries, and
weirs were built to prevent their escape. The shrimp grew to eating size in naturally replenished waters.
Out of their element, though, shrimp proved to be finicky
eaters, fragile and prone to diseases. It took Fujinaga twenty-five
years of trying, interrupted by World War II, to be able to grow ten
kilograms of shrimp to adulthood. In 1967, when he spoke to the
United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s first world
conference on shrimp culture in Mexico City, Fujinaga envisioned
a world where capitalism and altruism could coexist in the “vast
and boundless marshes, swamps, or jungles in the tropics.”
Shrimp farms, he predicted, “will greatly contribute toward the
