Shem Creek - A seafood-lover's paradise!

Just in time for the hot grill, a new breed of shrimp – more than twice the size of earlier breeds – is available from Australia.

It took 10 years, but scientists have engineered a new shrimp through selective breeding: the Australian Black Tiger prawn – kin to our Atlantic white shrimp.

While their work was centered around economics (they import 50% of their prawns), it also goes towards sustainability, since the new Black Tiger prawn is raised in drought-proof salt water ponds – a big plus for scorching hot Australia.

“Globally, aquaculture has been the fastest growing food production sector since the 1950s, approximately doubling production each decade” – Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)

If you get a stack of them lined up on your grill, I’d love to see a photo!

Fortunately for South Carolina, it doesn’t look like we’re gonna be environmentally impacted by BP’s oil spill. A bigger concern for many in the seafood industry here isn’t even about a drop in seafood supply, but rather, a drop in demand.

A recent poll by Louisiana State University of Gulf area residents found 57% of them said they were less likely to buy local seafood because of the spill.
– Seafood.com

True, you may be worried about seafood like Gulf residents are right now, but know this:

• of the 17% of the seafood Americans eat that comes from domestic sources, only 2% of that comes from the Gulf, according to the National Fisheries Institute, a trade group.

If everybody were aware of those numbers, the seafood market would largely remain stable throughout this environmental crisis. It still doesn’t solve the problem shrimpers are having with a huge reduction in supply out in the ocean though, but for shrimpers willing and able to make an occupational shift of sorts, shrimp farming may be an option worth looking into.

I had no idea how widespread shrimp farming is around the world until I just watched this video from Texas (A&M I think). I touches on all the different steps needed to get a shrimp farm going, but I’ll tell you right now, you’re probably gonna need some serious financial backing to get this project going.

According to Wikipedia, the U.S. hit a high of 5,000 tonnes of farmed shrimp production per year back in 2003 and 2004, but we’ve since slid back to 2,000 tonnes of farmed shrimp production (as of 2007); who knows, maybe you can get a piece of the market now.

Anyway, this diagram from SCDNR shows all the stages shrimp go through in their life cycle, something you’ll be intimately involved in if you work on a shrimp farm. Happy harvesting!