shrimp by catch

[small bites]

watching the shrimping thing on TV, and am disturbed by the by-catch. I know its a way of life but those wild shrimp dont taste any different than farm raised in my opinion. I guess my point is, why kill all of those juvenile fish. Those farms seem to be making more bang for the buck when it comes down to it.

[corndog]

Heres some food for thought!

http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/sustain/suscoasts/sizena.html

[Ibtsoom]

I dont have the energy to have this debate again. Eat whatever diseased, crappy farm raised seafood your heart desires. Good luck to ya.

[reeltime]

I dont have the energy to have this debate again. Eat whatever diseased, crappy farm raised seafood your heart desires. Good luck to ya.

Not me buddy i want what the good lord or mother nature has to offer.

[coachlaw]

Don't think I've ever disagreed with ya before SB, but this one has be goin', "WHAT????????" You don't have taste buds or somethin'? Gulf scrimps are healthy, nutritious, and YUMMY! Farm raised are just sickening.

[small bites]

Oh wow. Thanks for the the info. I feel enlightened. Thank you all for educating me. Geez, but the by-catch, it seems so wasteful.

[small bites]

I dont have the energy to have this debate again. Eat whatever diseased, crappy farm raised seafood your heart desires. Good luck to ya.

I wasnt up to the same place you have already explored on this subject, thank you for your patience with me.

[Milkjug]

I agree 100% with you, but don't feel like getting into it either. You ain't gonna get much support from this crowd though, it's like politics, we all have our minds made up already.

Rising fuel costs and competition from the farms will take care of a lot of this. By the way, those farms ain't perfect. Aquaculture waste is some bad stuff too.

[Swells]

I dunno, we often go by the shrimp boats when fishing offshore, since they are usually loaded with fish if they're not infested with shark or bottlenose dolphin. We also trade cheap beer for shrimp and "cull" which we use to get the fishing excited. I've handled many basket loads of cull before, the stuff they shovel over the side. It's mostly little crabs, some small squid, and a few small white baitfish along with the occasional runt red snapper. I was surprized that most of it was trash and these weird little crabs.

These days shrimpers are required to have turtle excluders, fish by-catch excluders, and special net designs so minimize finfish mortality. Yes they do get some but compared to decades ago before these excluders were required, it's way down. I'm no biologist but out of the hundreds of pounds of cull I've thrown overboard (and had to clean up that stinkin' mess), I'm not seeing much by-catch these days, mainly these ugly little red crabs and such trash. There certainly wasn't anything you could put a hook in and use for snapper or AJ bait, except maybe a weird looking eel now and then.

So I don't think there's much by-catch at least in the lower half of Texas where I fish offshore. Maybe you're right but I think the shrimpers want ... shrimp! They avoid reefs that could faoul their nets so they mainly work the "flats." They hate the cull because the swamper has to shovel it off the boat. The other thing the shrimpers want is yella tuna, and many have a tuna permit to keep 'em and sell 'em, maybe a few ling as well. These are usually caught by a rope with some hooks on it, not the net. If you ever go offshore and find a shrimper to trade with, some have some limited English and will talk with ya - they love lite beer and Marlboroughs. Some won't talk at all, and we'll just move on - the Viets seem harder to trade with and sometimes look pretty dangerous. Just my feeling for it.

[fishcatchr]

Like swells said. When all that by catch gets tossed overboard there always tons of bigger fish, sharks, and porpoise eating it. I doubt any of that by catch makes it to the bottom before its been eaten by other fish. It's definitely not wasted.

[Robalo]

Good post Swells!! By-catch-what about the gill-hooked 14.75" trout that floats away belly up? IT FEEDS OTHER SEALIFE-NOTHING IS WASTED-IT ALL IS PART OF THE FOOD CHAIN!! Little fish feed big fish, big fish feed bigger fish and so on. It's a bunch of BS propaganda put forth by the likes of PETA.

I think live kittens make great offshore bait-it decreases the over-burdened populations at animal shelters-geez, they're gonna be killed anyway if not adopted in 10 days. I can't fathom why folks think some BS TV show wakes them up on an "issue" which they dint know or care about until they see it and then formulate the opinion that the show was designed to imprint into the viewer's mind - Herr Geobbels was an expert on that during the 30's and 40's with the Jewish population-all were depicted as scum and rapists and thieves and millions were killed w/o World objection-yeah sure we knew, but we dint care in gummint-hell, we even turned away ship's from Europe loaded with Jewish emigrants and ignored the ovens and gas chambers.

Be VERY careful what you see and ask for - it may bite ya in the backside. Look at Obama-Hope & Change my butt-SSDD but even worse!!

[PasadenaMan]

Haha, I remember the Peta Cat bait for shark fishing video..... Free Range Shrimp lol