March 22, 2014 — The Southeast shrimp trawl fishery is one of the nine dirtiest in the United States, a watchdog group says.
Oceana, an international ocean conservation organization, faults the shrimp trawlers in the Gulf of Mexico for killing turtles in their nets and wasting a pound of billfish for every pound of shrimp they catch.
"The level of waste is truly astonishing — just thousands and thousands of animals and millions and millions of pounds of fish," said Amanda Keledjian, the report author and an Oceana marine scientist. "People should be outraged, as a scientist, as a consumer, as just a person concerned about the environment, the waste is incredible and the numbers are staggering."
Oceana said 50,000 turtles are killed in the Gulf each year.
Moby Solangi, executive director of the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies, which rescues, rehabilitates and releases turtles at its Gulfport campus, said most of the damage is done in the Gulf, not the Mississippi Sound.
"To the best of our knowledge, the turtle bycatch is not an issue, not a big issue, in Mississippi," he said. "The state has instituted a lot of measures in the last few years — like getting people (turtle excluder devices) and monitoring them better. It is not a problem in Mississippi."
DMR programs
Kelly Lucas, chief science officer at the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, said TEDs are required everywhere in the 100-plus square miles of the Mississippi Sound.
"The DMR has several different programs," she said. "We used a grant from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation to purchase TEDs for commercial shrimpers, and helped install them."
She said they also gave shrimpers a measuring device known as an angle iron and taught them how to use it to ensure the TED is installed at the proper angle.
Read the full story at the Biloxi Sun Herald