May rains likely to shrink catch of brown shrimp

Freshwater influx, low prices worry Texas harvesters.

Capt. Juan Ortiz and his mate, Frank Gonzales, scooped Friday’s shrimp catch from the culling box into large plastic bins at the RK Seafood docks in San Leon.

They had taken the 50-foot Freewheeler into Galveston Bay at 4:30 a.m. instead of joining the fleet of shrimp boats that headed to deeper waters when brown shrimp season opened at sunset Wednesday.

The men didn’t want to risk the longer trip after hearing a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration prediction that the record rain in May will mean a smaller shrimp harvest this season.

Shrimp boat captains in the Gulf whom Ortiz has spoken with are finding few shrimp and some are heading back to port in disappointment.

“I have friends out there,” Ortiz said. “They are coming back tomorrow afternoon.”

NOAA is predicting a brown shrimp harvest of 42.8 million pounds, well below the 54-year average of 56.5 million pounds in the western Gulf of Mexico. The prediction comes after rain soaked the Texas Gulf Coast, pushing freshwater into saltwater estuaries and forcing shrimp from where they mature safe from deepsea predators.

It’s a prediction that worries many in an industry beset with both domestic and foreign challenges, including an influx of supply from overseas.

After several years of high prices, the price of shrimp dropped steeply this year, causing concern among shrimp boat owners about covering their costs.

“Our prices are way down this year,” said David Aparicio, who with his brothers owns 15 shrimp boats based in Palacios. He said lower fuel costs are helping some.

The domestic catch brought in $518 million in 2011, a figure dwarfed by the $5.17 billion in imported shrimp, according to NOAA and the U.S. Agriculture Department.

White shrimp, which were unaffected by the spring rains, and brown shrimp captured in the Gulf make up 68 percent of the domestic harvest, according to NOAA, with most of the catch coming from Texas and Louisiana.

White shrimp is less important in Texas, where 4 million pounds were captured in 2013, compared with 23 million pounds of brown shrimp.

NOAA predicts the Texas brown-shrimp catch will drop to 18 million pounds this season.

But there is hope because even the authors of the NOAA forecast say the timing of the rains make the prediction uncertain.

James Nance, director of the NOAA Fisheries Laboratory in Galveston, said that shrimp mature in the estuaries from March through April and begin moving into the Gulf in May. Because the heaviest rains fell in May, scientists don’t know whether the rains drove the shrimp out before they were ready or they moved into the Gulf early and were unaffected by the fresh water.

“We just aren’t sure whether we have a low shrimp population or they moved out of our sampling area,” Nance said.

John Williams, director of the Southern Shrimp Alliance based in Tarpon Springs, Fla., said it could take as long as two weeks to get a good idea of the catch size. “Projecting shrimp seasons is very hard,” Williams said. “Sometimes they are wrong.”

Still, Gulf Coast shrimpers are worried.

“With all this freshwater we got, it may hurt us a little bit,” Aparicio said.

Nello Cassarino, owner of Galveston Shrimp Co., said he was hearing mixed results from the 75 boats he buys from.

“The truth is it’s too early to tell,” Cassarino said. “The Gulf is too big. It’s hard to pinpoint off a couple of samplings what’s really happening out there.”

Andrea Hance, executive director of the Texas Shrimp Association based in Brownsville, said captains she has spoken with were reporting a good catch. “They have actually exceeded our expectations,” Hance said.

With the lower prices, Hance is hoping shrimpers will encounter larger-than-normal shrimp, which can be sold at a premium.

Most of the imported shrimp is grown in ponds and harvested twice a year, so the shrimp are generally small, she said. But she admits that the rain makes the possibility of large shrimp less likely. “I’m thinking they are going to be smaller because they were prematurely swept off shore,” she said. “Smaller shrimp don’t survive as much.”

Freewheeler’s catch for the day, about 200 pounds of small shrimp, sold for $80. “That’s not enough to pay for fuel,” Gonzales complained.

The poor price and bad news from the Gulf convinced Ortiz to wait until Aug. 15, when the limits are removed from white shrimp. He is hoping to find larger shrimp on his next outing that will fetch fatter prices.

The industry challenges — lower prices, increasing fuel costs, regulations and the vagaries — have made shrimping an increasingly rare career choice.

“Over the last 20 years we’ve lost about twothirds of shrimp boats that have had to close shop,” Hance said.

Although shrimp as a species is not declining, the dwindling shrimp harvest shows that the number of boats hunting them is. The annual Texas shrimp catch, brown and white, declined from about 50 million pounds in 1990 to about 28 million pounds in 2013.