The Turtles vs Shrimp Dilemma

Conservation in Conflict

Jack Rudloe and Anne Rudloe

With a jerk of the tail bag rope, a deluge of fishy, bulging-eyed water creatures tumbled out on the deck, a huge loggerhead sea turtle on top of the pile. Dock lights gleamed off her scaly yellow flippers and brown barnacle-covered shell. Gasping for breath, she slowly blinked her heavy-lidded eyes. As she gained strength, she began plowing through the squirming catch of croakers, crabs, and shrimp like a bulldozer.

The RV Georgia Bulldog, a 73-foot shrimp trawler run by the University of Georgia, was dragging its nets along the Georgia Sea Islands at the height of the sea turtle nesting season. One of the trawls had a turtle excluder device (TED), or “turtle shooter,” as the shrimpers called it. The other was a standard trawl without a grid of any sort to block the entrance. Sure enough, it caught a turtle.

Biologists from the University of Georgia grabbed the 200-pound female by her front and rear flippers and flipped her over on her back so we could tag her. She went wild, scattering the shrimp and fish with each pound of her flippers, snapping her powerful jaws that could crush a shell or a hand. After affixing a metal tag in her fore-flippers, the biologists dragged the loggerhead across the deck, hoisted her onto the rail, and heaved her over the side. She landed with a splash and rocketed off.

The great ponderous sea turtle has become a symbol of the world’s environmental conflict, of uncaring pollution of the ocean, and of humans’ disregard for other forms of life. The turtle offers itself helplessly as it struggles out of the sea to lay its eggs on land. Awkward and ungainly on land, it is a thing of beauty and grace as it swims in the sea. They drown in our fishing nets, are sucked up by dredges, and are ground into turtle burger, chopped up by boat propellers, and blown to bits when obsolete oil rigs are removed by detonation. People eat them and their eggs in much of the world. They wash up dead on the beaches, often with their guts crammed with plastic bags, which the turtles mistake for their favorite meal, jellyfish.

Today all five species of American sea turtles are protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, but before 1966, sea-turtle meat was freely sold at restaurants. Shrimpers routinely butchered greens, Kemp’s ridleys, and loggerheads. Deckhands made good pocket change selling turtle meat to the fish houses. Key West’s turtle kraals were a famous attraction, where tourists snapped pictures as sailing sloops from Nicaragua and the Cayman Islands unloaded hundreds of big green turtles at a time. But by the 1980s, times had changed. Conservationists were fighting to save sea turtles from extinction, and shrimpers were fighting federal proposals to require TEDs in their nets, which they feared would dump shrimp as well as turtles out of their nets.

There was little question that sea turtles were in trouble from shrimp trawling. Whenever the fleets of shrimp boats dragged close to the turtle nesting beaches of the southeastern United States, dead sea turtles soon washed up on the beaches.

Sea turtles can hold their breath underwater for hours, or even days in winter when they’re sleeping on the sea floor, but they must come to the surface to breathe. However, when dragged in a trawl, or hooked on a swordfish boat’s longline, they panic and soon drown. When the shrimp fleet left, the mortality stopped, and few strandings occurred. It was illegal to kill turtles, but the law was rarely enforced, and TEDs were not yet mandatory, so the responsibility lay with the shrimper. Often, when they caught a turtle, the crew hurriedly butchered it, stashed the meat in the refrigerator, and threw the shell overboard to hide the evidence. The next day they had turtle soup. Commercial fishermen who grew up eating turtle along Florida’s Panhandle coast considered turtle meat to be as much a part of their diet as any other seafood. The critically endangered Kemp’s ridleys that nested on the beaches of Rancho Nuevo in Mexico had declined from 40,000 nesting females a day in the late 1940s to 6,000 in 1960 to 500 in the 1980s. Mexico, in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, had initiated intensive conservation efforts, stopped the harvesting of eggs, and stepped up nest protection. Hundreds of thousands of hatchlings made it to the water, but the mother turtles continued their decline. Death in shrimp nets was the chief suspect.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was responsible for nesting turtles on the beach, but the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) took charge when the turtles were back at sea. The NMFS was charged with the conflicting responsibilities of protecting sea turtles and helping the fishing industry. NMFS scientists had spent years trying to help the people who shrimped, but now they were caught in the middle, with environmentalists demanding that they enforce the Endangered Species Act and crack down on the shrimpers. The NMFS began looking for a technological solution by creating a net modification that would allow turtles to escape while keeping the shrimp. Beginning in 1978, the agency spent over $2 million developing its TED, a panel that shunts big things (turtles, horseshoe crabs, large rays) out of the hole while letting shrimp pass into the net.

According to NMFS statistics, it was estimated that 48,000 sea turtles were caught each year on trawlers, and approximately 11,000 died. Of those, 10,000 were loggerheads and 750 were Kemp’s ridleys, the world’s most endangered sea turtle. The catch data came from 38,000 observer hours on shrimp boats, where 498 turtles were caught and 168, or 33 percent, were dead on deck. Some of those fatalities came from trawlers making excessively and unusually long drags—one boat up to ten hours.

We have published research on sea turtle biology, written books on them, and worked with shrimpers for over thirty years, and those numbers didn’t match our experiences. We had personally witnessed dozens of turtles get caught, but only one was dead on deck. The rest, if the shrimpers didn’t eat them (which they occasionally did), were thrown back alive.

While on an assignment for the Smithsonian Magazine, we asked the NMFS to let us interview the observers who witnessed such mortality, but we were refused. The issue was so controversial, we were told, that if their names got out, their lives would be in jeopardy. This seemed a bit strange because these observers were at sea for weeks with the same potentially murderous shrimpers, counting dead turtles, and they never came to any harm. By sheer accident we met an observer in Port Arthur, Texas, who said that in two years of riding shrimp boats, he had not seen a single turtle caught. When asked about this, the NMFS said that wasn’t unusual. Depending on where it is fishing, a vessel may work for weeks, months, or years without a turtle fatality, and some boats never caught them at all. Yet the cumulative impact of the fleet was considered serious.

At the time, there were 7,000 large trawlers in the South Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico and another 10,200 smaller boats. Even though smaller vessels made shorter tows, which give the turtles a better chance of surviving, they too drowned turtles. Mortality was especially high off the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands during white shrimp season.

Most of the shrimpers in the western Gulf of Mexico, where the bulk of the shrimping industry was found, insisted they almost never caught turtles in their trawls. The biologists argued that it didn’t take a lot of mortality to impact the turtle population, especially the endangered Kemp’s ridley. Unlike penaeid shrimp, which broadcast millions of eggs and live only a year or two, sea turtles were slow to reproduce and laid only a hundred eggs every two years after they matured, which could take twenty or thirty years. According to NMFS data, with shrimpers collectively making 300,000 trips a year, it would take only 1 percent of the fleet catching a turtle to have a severe impact.

By 1981, the Federal Fishing Agency was promoting voluntary use of the TED. In 1983 it began passing out free TEDs to encourage shrimpers to try them. Unfortunately, the first TEDs were heavy rigid metal devices. The fishermen quickly judged them to be dangerous, swinging violently overhead when nets came up in rough seas. They were also expensive, costing some $400 per net in an industry already stretched to the economic breaking point by rising fuel costs, overfishing, and competition from cheap imported Third World shrimp.

Arguably dangerous, expensive, and, worst of all, imposed from outside the closed, clannish world of the docks, the free TEDs were left to rust on shore. All the while the dead turtles continued to wash ashore, and environmental groups were demanding an end to the killing.

Later versions were lighter, safer, and cheaper, but nobody would touch them. Despite limited test results to the contrary, shrimpers feared that, under real-world working conditions, the lighter and cheaper TEDs would still cause them to lose up to 20 percent of the shrimp caught. By 1986, when the program for voluntary use of TEDs failed, the patience of the environmental groups had run out. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council demanded mandatory use of TEDs. The NMFS then announced proposed regulations, but nobody on either side was satisfied. Notice of an impending lawsuit was then filed by the Center for Marine Conservation under the Endangered Species Act against the NMFS. Such a suit would almost certainly succeed and would probably force closures of the fishery.

Their attention finally engaged, industry representatives asked for mediation. The agency then offered a novel approach: All affected parties should sit down and negotiate their own settlement, writing the regulation themselves. A professional labor mediator was used to chair the sessions, and a series of four meetings were held. Environmentalists wanted immediate use of TEDs everywhere. Industry offered to limit the amount of time the nets would stay down so that turtles could be brought up and released before they drowned. While theoretically possible, this approach was unenforceable and therefore unacceptable. The heated arguments continued.

When public hearings were held to require TEDs, the shrimpers rose up in rebellion. Thousands showed up in public auditoriums in towns like Biloxi to vow civil disobedience against what they perceived as a threat to their survival. Governor Edwin Edwards of Louisiana testified, “Perhaps some species were just meant to disappear,” to overwhelming applause. He continued, “If it comes to a question of whether the shrimpers or the turtles are going to be in trouble, bye-bye, turtles.” However, it was bye-bye Governor Edwards when he was later convicted on 17 of 26 counts of racketeering, extortion, money laundering, and mail fraud.

Shrimpers are good at catching shrimp and lousy at public relations. After blockading major-port shipping channels in Tampa, Houston, and Port Aransas and hanging turtle dolls in effigy in resistance to using TEDs, they caught the public’s eye, but the attention wasn’t friendly. While all sides appeared equal at the table, in reality the environmental groups had the overwhelming firepower of the Endangered Species Act on their side. Industry representatives had only their power of persuasion and the knowledge that they might well be closed down if an agreement wasn’t reached. Finally a rule was agreed upon to phase in the use of TEDs over a three-year period, 1987 to 1990.

When the Endangered Species Act came up for reauthorization, the war moved to Congress, which debated an amendment to give the industry a two-year moratorium on TED use. Again, the argument was long and heated. In the middle of it, the TED regulations took effect on January 1, 1988. The gear was required for about a month, until a judge ruled against the State of Louisiana’s lawsuit to stop TEDs but granted an injunction on enforcement pending the appeal. The NMFS declared that only in Cape Canaveral, where loggerhead sea turtles swarmed into the shipping channel in incredible numbers, would the protection devices be mandated.

Even though the U.S. government held workshops and training in Costa Rica, shrimpers still spurn the use of TEDs. In the past four years, the National Coast Guard caught 29 boats cheating on TED regulations, yet not a single sanction was imposed. The U.S. State Department levied temporary trade embargoes to force compliance, but violations continue. On the other hand, at least some shrimpers in Madagascar voluntarily embraced TEDs, saying they cut down on bycatch (all that is not shrimp) and work.

Today, even with 98 percent compliance by the American shrimp industry, sea turtles continue to wash up on the beaches from time to time. Hence, the environmentalists have pressed for more efficient TEDs. When a number of leatherbacks were stranded, the government forced the shrimpers to expand the openings to 71 inches so that the rare behemoths would be shot out, along with more shrimp. At the time, there were a large number of these smooth-skinned black-and-white monsters that weighed up to a thousand pounds, passing through the East Coast waters eating cannonball jellyfish, but the new size holes became mandated Gulf- and Atlantic-wide.

Steve Kirchner, a spokesman for the shrimping industry in South Carolina, expressed the shrimpers’ frustration: “No matter what happens, they blame the shrimpers. You talk to officials and see the glaze come over their eyes. You have to get through by saying something different than ‘You’re destroying our livelihood with your regulation.’ They don’t listen to that. They hear it all the time, and they don’t care.”

Sea turtles were only the beginning of the shrimp industry’s environmental problems. Environmental groups publicized the fact that for every pound of shrimp that reaches the table, nine to fifteen pounds of other dead and dying fish and invertebrates were shoveled over the side. No longer did the public view the romantic shrimp boats putting out to sea as a wonderful way of life. Suddenly they were seen as death mills that churned up and destroyed the bottom and left a wake of dead fish and sea turtles.

Life expires quickly on the deck of a shrimp boat when it’s avalanched and crushed in the alien world of air. Seeing the eyes glaze over and life slip away is not easy. Squid and anchovies die quickly, while others, like stingrays, linger. In the wintertime, many of the fish make it back alive, but in the broiling heat of the summer, probably very few survive.

Shrimpers say they’re feeding the ocean; environmentalists counter they’re disrupting the normal behavior of marine life and destroying the world. The National Marine Fisheries Service created a furor when it declared that the red snapper was overfished in the western Gulf of Mexico and imposed quotas on both commercial and recreational fishermen in 1997. Recreational fishermen were infuriated when catch limits in federal waters were dropped again to two fish per boat in 2007. A barrage of court challenges from recreational and commercial red snapper fishermen followed, claiming that the source of the problem was shrimpers who killed juvenile fish in their bycatch.

In the 1990s, a growing environmental awareness developed. As nature films and programs became part of regular television programming, people watched beautiful reef fish swimming across their television screens like aquariums. Reef aquariums became commonplace in homes. Reef-tank technology improved, pet shops proliferated, and aquarium enthusiasts could watch dazzling reef fishes and colorful invertebrates in their homes. International ecotourism increased, the diving industry mushroomed, and people swam, snorkeled, and dove on the magnificent undersea coral gardens in the Bahamas, Belize, and far-away places like the Philippines, the Seychelles, and the Red Sea. Conservation groups proliferated; gill nets were banned in Florida, and shrimp nets were limited in size in inshore waters. Across the globe, and particularly in the United States, awareness spread that juveniles of valuable fish species were being killed in the process, including trout, croaker, drum, sharks, and snapper.

In the central and western Gulf of Mexico, the valuable red snapper fishery had declined catastrophically, and shrimpers killing juvenile fish were the probable cause. Off Texas and Louisiana, in tow after tow, hundreds of the little orange fish that could have grown up and provided marvelous meals to people were shoveled over the side dead along with the rest of the “trash.” Commercial hook-and-liners joined the recreational fishing organizations in demanding that the government put an end to the overcapitalized and oversized shrimping industry and do it quickly. The men who dragged the sea became scapegoats for all the factors affecting the loss of productivity in the sea.

Well-financed sports fishermen began a smear campaign, labeling shrimpers “bikers on boats” and “resource pirates” who raped the seas. TEDs were soon followed by bycatch reduction devices (BRDs). Regulations, closures, and restrictions rained down upon the shrimpers’ heads.

The new political reality was expressed by the website www.Shrimpsuck.org: “Shrimp is the number-one seafood in the U.S. Eating shrimp can be among the worst things you can do to the ocean. Bottom trawling and farming for shrimp can destroy the ocean. You don’t want to be a part of that!”

Sports fishermen, who were trying to put an end to shrimping, labeled bycatch waste, waste, waste! Yet even with a hundred boats working the area, the billions of fish and other creatures that perished on the decks were instantly assimilated by the sea. Most of the time, no fresh dead fish came up in the trawls. It didn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to guess what happened to the bycatch. There are winners and losers at all levels of shrimping. The flocks of seagulls, jack crevalles, porpoises, and sharks gulped down the dead and dying as fast as the leftovers were raked overboard. And down below, crabs and even loggerheads and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles feasted on the sudden flood of protein discharged into the system. However, on rare occasions, when the tide is slack and hundreds of boats are working a small area in the summer heat, the discards of a hundred trawlers or more working an area pile up on the bottom and rot. The bottom sours, the shrimp vanish, and the shrimpers move on.

A necropsy performed on a sea turtle that washed up on a Cumberland Island, Georgia, beach had jumbo shrimp, squid, and fish in its stomach—all fast swimmers that a turtle could never normally catch. This raised the possibility that some loggerheads were swimming into the net to partake of the catch and then turning around and escaping. Meanwhile, another feeding frenzy was taking place on the bottom: Blue crabs, catfish, trout, and the shrimp themselves were having a feast.

Even though mackerel, flounder, and whiting were also in decline, Congress didn’t want to hurt fisheries’ biggest cash cow: shrimp. The annual crop of 350 million pounds dragged up from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and Southeast brought $450 to $500 million into the economy. Whether the conservationists liked it or not, whole towns and economies depended on shrimp. If the industry folded, in addition to the fishermen, a giant cadre of harvesters, processors, wholesale and retail distributors, and truckers would be put out of work. Behind them would come a secondary economic collapse as boatyards, maintenance shops, gear, fuel, and ice docks closed their doors.

After mandating the use of TEDs, Congress ordered the National Marine Fisheries Service to do something about bycatch for all fisheries that entangled, hooked, or killed seabirds, sea turtles, seals, dolphins, and even whales in their fishing efforts. The NMFS’s fisheries engineers came up with BRDs, which were panels or devices that were inserted into the trawls to let the fish out.

Seeing that legislation would pass, the shrimpers again allowed observers to ride their boats and measure the catches and assisted them in developing BRDs, hoping they wouldn’t lose too many shrimp. And if they did succeed, it would mean less bycatch and less work culling it off. From 1993 to 1996, NMFS observers logged 5,700 hours using nets with and without 12 different types of BRDs. They weighed and measured the catches from all over the Gulf of Mexico, the Tortugas Fishing Grounds, and the South Atlantic. They tested them on white shrimp, rock shrimp, pink shrimp, and browns, comparing the catches of nets with and without BRDs. Never in the history of fishing were catches given such scrutiny. Of the 60-pound average catch per hour, the observers found that only 16 percent of the total catch by weight was shrimp. The other 84 percent included more than 450 species in the Gulf and 150 in the South Atlantic.

Eventually the NMFS came up with several designs that reduced the bycatch by 30 percent, but this fell short of the mark of achieving a 50 percent reduction in the juvenile red snapper catch. Croakers, spots, mackerel, spotted sea trout, and other finfish swam out of the openings, but not nearly as much as the conservation community wanted. Studies showed that 37 species of crustacea, 166 fish, and 29 other invertebrate groups were not excluded from nets. Nevertheless, the shrimpers were required to use both TEDs and BRDs, and they got stiff fines if they didn’t.

When the red snapper population failed to recover, the Gulf Coast Conservation Association, a powerful group of recreational fishermen, smelled blood. They filed suit in federal court, demanding an end to trawl fishing. They were joined by some prominent and well-publicized marine biologists who did the lecture circuit and appeared on public radio and television, predicting that because of the worldwide trawl fishery and its horrendous impact on marine life, seafood would become a thing of the past in the next fifty years.

Over the years, shrimpers have altered the seafloor and damaged fragile biological communities with their nets’ chains, foot ropes, and heavy iron-clad doors dragging up all that sponge and life. They have drawn the ire of the environmental community and conservationists. However, not all trawling is destructive, especially when nets are dragged over sand or mud bottoms. Dr. Joseph Donohue, a coastal geologist working in the Florida Panhandle, told us that during a strong northwestern blow, up to three feet of sediment from the Gulf seafloor was churned up by wave action, which was far more than any shrimp net did. Furthermore, during tropical storms, six feet of sand and mud could be stripped away. But that nuance was lost on the general public.

As the fleet overexpanded in the 1980s and 1990s, a few fishermen desperate to make payments on their newly financed boats moved into new areas that had been considered too rocky to drag nets on, and they severely damaged the bottom. Some captains took their nets off the doors, added heavy chain to the doors, and dragged the shallow bottoms, deliberately snapping off coral heads. When the bottom was flattened, and the coral heads and sponges were broken from their holdfasts, the nets were put back on, and they caught tons of pink shrimp that were hiding in the structure. Shrimpers often talked about “breaking in new bottom” and likened it to farmers plowing a field so that they could plant crops.

But some stony corals take decades or even centuries to grow. In the 1970s, we were contractors working on a fishery management plan for coral. To fulfill bureaucratic requirements, we were hired to describe the “coral fishery” even though there wasn’t one. Harvesting coral in Florida waters had been illegal for years, but the government wanted to show it had covered all the bases. We could have said “no coral fishery; that’s that; let’s go home.” But when we used the opportunity to blow the whistle on the trawl damage to corals that was occurring in the Apalachee Bay off St. Marks, Florida, we were summarily fired. The highly political fisheries councils were dominated by fisheries lobbyists who didn’t want to hear it. The damage couldn’t be covered up for long, however. Trawling with door nets was eventually prohibited in that area. The coral heads and gorgonians are now thicker than ever.

Governments have struggled with protecting resources for centuries, closing bays and sounds periodically to allow shrimp and other marine life to grow larger. As a member of the Florida Marine Fisheries Council said, “We can’t manage fish; we can only manage fishermen.” In 1981 the Cooperative Texas Closure stopped shrimping for two months out of the year for 200 miles out to give brown shrimp, the most valuable fishery in the nation, a rest. That same year, nearly 5,000 acres was permanently set aside to create the Tortugas Pink Shrimp Sanctuary.

The Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic Federal Shrimp Fisheries Councils, established under the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Act, created exclusive economic zones and mandated U.S. Coast Guard enforcement of their regulations. The Councils then set limits and quotas, regulated gear and mesh size, and implemented further TED and bycatch regulations. By 2002 any boat shrimping in federal waters was required to have a permit, and shrimping became a limited-entry fishery when the government placed a moratorium on new fishing permits. Because of these actions, there are more shrimp than ever. Over the past thirty years the collective landings for pink, brown, and white shrimp have remained the same—around 150 million pounds a year. But since 2002, possibly due to the expanding dead zone, collective landings have dropped to 92 million pounds as the fleet has downsized.

One consequence of the turtle vs shrimp dilemma was that, as the demand exceeded the supply of wild-caught shrimp, and environmental problems of drowning sea turtles and bycatch got more attention, shrimp farming developed. Farmed shrimp are now cheaper than crab and a great number of fish. They can be grown in great quantities and are not subject to the intensive regulations that have closed or reduced many wild fisheries on the U.S. East and West Coasts. That is good news for shrimp farmers, not so good to those who made their living harvesting shrimp from the wild.