Louisiana State University Archives

Investigating Shrimp Fraud Is an Urgent Matter on the Gulf Coast

May 1, 2025 — Imagine sitting down for a meal at a restaurant with a view of the ocean. You are on vacation, and the restaurant’s décor includes fishnets, pictures of boats and taxidermied exemplars of the local catch. You order a plate of shrimp, reasonably expecting it to have come from nearby waters.

Way too often it comes from thousands of miles away, Dave Williams told a small crowd at the Louisiana Shrimp Festival on a summer-hot day in New Orleans last fall. “And that’s despicable,” he said.

Mr. Williams is a commercial fisheries scientist who was in New Orleans to shed light on what he considers an epidemic problem: restaurants and festivals misrepresenting imported shrimp as locally caught. In many cases, diners are paying for what they think is more expensive, high-quality wild Gulf shrimp, but is actually an inferior product produced by an aquaculture industry that has a history of labor abuse. A 2020 study by Louisiana State University found two thirds of imported shrimp samples purchased in Baton Rouge contained banned veterinary drugs.

These farm-raised imports from Asia and South America have flooded the U.S. market, depressing prices. Fishing communities along the Gulf Coast have been decimated and livelihoods destroyed in part because the domestic shrimp industry is being pushed to the edge of extinction.

Mr. Williams founded a company, SEAD Consulting, that developed a genetic test to rapidly identify seafood species. He is using the technology to expose restaurants and festivals misrepresenting their seafood offerings, especially shrimp.

Read the full story at The New York Times

New research shows pandemic good for recreational fishing due to ‘social fishtancing’

August 18, 2021 — Recreational fishing in the U.S. is largely a personal hobby that scales up to a multibillion-dollar economic activity. More than 44 million people in the U.S. identify as recreational anglers making this hobby second only to jogging in terms of popular outdoor activities.

At the beginning of the pandemic last spring as things were shutting down, fisheries science researchers at LSU, U.S. Geological Survey and Clemson University saw the opportunity to study how the pandemic was affecting recreational anglers. LSU launched an online survey from July to August 2020 and received nearly 18,000 responses across 10 states. The researchers asked recreational anglers 20 questions that included if they fished more or less since the pandemic, what their motivations were and if they thought fishing is safe in terms of COVID-19 exposure.

“What we found is people still fished and in fact, they fished a little bit more during the pandemic,” said LSU Department of Oceanography & Coastal Sciences Assistant Professor Stephen Midway, who is the lead author of this study that is published in PLOS ONE.

Out of five anglers, four fished as much during the pandemic as they did before while, one angler out of the five fished more—taking about one additional trip in the spring. Although the increase may seem small, it has a positive ripple effect for the economy and fisheries management.

Read the full story at PHYS.org

Gulf of Mexico ‘dead zone’ has grown larger than Connecticut

August 9, 2021 — A “dead zone,” or an area of low to no oxygen, in the Gulf of Mexico has grown larger than Connecticut, creating an uninhabitable environment for some commercial marine life, and scientists are saying the sparse amount of tropical activity has played a role.

An hypoxic zone, also referred to as a dead zone, is formed when excess nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus from agriculture and sewage from cities and farms upstream wash into the Gulf. Algae then feeds on these nutrients during the warmer months, and when that algae dies and sinks to the Gulf’s floor, the bacteria that then eats away at the large tangled masses depletes the oxygen in the surrounding water.

The resulting area of low oxygen is called a hypoxic zone, or a dead zone as it becomes unable to support marine life, and it forms in the Gulf every year. Not only can it harm local wildlife, but it can also financially impact fisheries.

Hypoxic waters have been found to alter fish diets, growth rates, reproduction, habitat use and availability of commercially harvested species such as shrimp, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Now, fisheries along the coast of Louisiana will have to deal with a larger-than-average dead zone.

“Basically half of the Louisiana coast for several miles, many miles off shore, the oxygen was too low to support the occurrence of penaeid shrimp, which is one of our biggest economic fisheries in that area,” Dr. Nancy Rabalais, professor at Louisiana State University and LUMCON, and also the principal investigator, told AccuWeather. “So that area was basically lost as available and suitable habitat to those shrimp. How that’s going to convert to catches in money in the next month or so, I can’t really say.”

Read the full story at AccuWeather

LSU study finds Southern flounder are disappearing throughout their habitat, including Louisiana

March 29, 2021 — When LSU researchers recently set out to gather data on southern flounder, they ran into a problem: they could hardly find any in Louisiana.

It has been well-documented that their population has dropped steeply in recent years, but they were first to report the problem extended beyond the state’s waters. A study they published this month reported that the declines in the flat, football-shaped fish’s population were happening throughout their range, which spans from the Carolina to Texas.

“To see similar declines happening throughout their range was surprising and a concerning aspect,” said Kenneth Erickson, the first author on the LSU-led study. He added that it could be a potential warning sign for other aquatic life similar to southern flounder.

In recent years, the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has logged some of the lowest numbers of adult female flounder in the past four decades.

Read the full story at The Advocate

Project aims to boost Louisiana oyster safety and profits

September 9, 2020 — LSU researchers have launched a project that aims to give Louisiana oyster harvesters a way of detecting whether waters contain viruses or bacteria that can cause some people to get sick when they eat the shellfish raw or undercooked.

“This project is meant to decrease the number of people getting sick and also decrease oyster recalls,” civil and environmental engineering professor Zhiqiang Deng said in a news release. “The project will aid in the economic development of Louisiana by reducing costly oyster ground closures and recalls, thereby increasing oyster production.”

One-third to 40% of the oysters harvested in the U.S. come from Louisiana waters, more than any other state. The industry employs about 4,000 people in the state, with an economic impact of $317 million annually, according to the Louisiana Seafood Promotion & Marketing Board.

About a fifth of all oysters harvested in Louisiana come from the Terrebonne Basin, an area that includes all of Terrebonne and parts of Lafourche and several other parishes between the Acthafalaya River and Bayou Lafourche, state figures show.

Read the full story at Houma Today

Hurricane Laura delivers a blow to Louisiana fishing industry

September 3, 2020 — Location determines the extent of damage for those in the fisheries industry have sustained from Hurricane Laura.
Mark Shirley, aquaculture specialist with the LSU AgCenter and Louisiana Sea Grant, said the farther west you go, the worse it is.

“Most of the fishermen in the Vermilion Parish area were able to move their boats and equipment to higher ground before the storm,” he said. “However, the guys in Cameron were hit really hard.”

Shirley said he was far enough from the east side of the storm that he didn’t receive a lot of damage. He said his lights are on, and he didn’t lose anything in his freezer.

“We have fishermen in areas that escaped a lot of damage who are chipping in to help those in need,” he said. Some of that help includes generators, fuel and other supplies.

Thu Bui, AgCenter and Louisiana Sea Grant fisheries agent, said fishermen in the lower St. Mary Parish area dodged a bullet with this storm.

“We were really preparing for that big 12- to 18-foot surge of water that was predicted, but thankfully, that didn’t happen,” she said. “We had about 4 to 5 feet in Intracoastal City, but it could have been a lot worse.”

Read the full story at St. Mary Now

Millions of plastic pellets are flowing into Gulf

August 20, 2020 — It’s been more than two weeks since a cargo ship in New Orleans spilled millions – possibly billions – of tiny plastic pellets into the Mississippi River, but state and federal agencies have issued no penalties and are not yet sure who’s responsible for the mess or which agency, if any, should clean it up.

Meanwhile, the white pellets, commonly called “nurdles,” a raw material for producing plastic products, continue to wash up on both banks of the river and will eventually flow out to sea, where they’ll likely be eaten by fish and other marine life, said Mark Benfield, an oceanographer and plastic pollution expert at LSU.

“By the time the agencies get around to determining who’s responsible, it’ll be too late,” he said. “It’ll all be in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Large quantities of nurdles have washed up in Gretna, Algiers Point, Crescent Park in Bywater and the Chalmette Battlefield in St. Bernard Parish. In a one-square-foot quadrant of Crescent Park, Benfield estimated as many as 49,500 nurdles.

Read the full story at Houma Today

Pollution, Hurricanes, and the Pandemic Spell Trouble for Gulf Shrimp and Seafood Industries

August 5, 2020 — Today researchers announced the size of the Gulf of Mexico dead zone, the official measurement NOAA uses to track its size year over year. This comes on the heels of bad news from another NOAA report indicating that the volume of Gulf shrimp landings in June 2020 was the lowest ever recorded.

Researchers found that the dead zone measured 5,048 square kilometers, slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island. This year’s dead zone is much smaller than predicted, not because nitrogen pollution flowing into the Gulf was lower, but because Hurricane Hanna dispersed it at the time it was measured.

Hurricanes have dispersed the dead zone in previous years, causing its size to be smaller than expected given data on nitrogen pollution flowing into the Gulf in the same year. In fact, earlier this year Louisiana University and NOAA researchers predicted, assuming no hurricane, that nitrogen loading levels in the Gulf would cause a dead zone that was 20,000 square kilometers, which is about the size of New Hampshire.

On its face, this may seem like a silver lining. But these hurricanes will likely make tracking the dead zone size even more challenging in the years ahead. And with climate change expected to increase hurricane size and intensity in the Gulf between now and the end of the century, it’s clear that there are long-term challenges to measuring the Gulf dead zone. To make matters worse hurricanes have a negative impact on Gulf fishing industries, too.

Read the full story at the Union of Concerned Scientists

Smaller-than-expected Gulf of Mexico ‘dead zone’ measured

August 5, 2020 — The following was released by NOAA:

NOAA-supported scientists have determined this year’s Gulf of Mexico “dead zone”— an area of low to no oxygen that can kill fish and marine life — is approximately 2,116 square miles, or equivalent to 1.4 million acres of habitat potentially unavailable to fish and bottom species.

The measured size of the dead zone is the third smallest in the 34-year record of surveys. The average hypoxic zone over the past five years is 5,408-square miles, which is 2.8 times larger than the 2035 target set by the Hypoxia Task Force.

The annual dead zone survey was led by scientists at Louisiana State University and the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium during a research cruise from July 25 to August 1 aboard the R/V Pelicano.

Read the full release here

Effort aims to curb number of abandoned crab traps in Louisiana waters

April 20, 2020 — A new program is targeting the thousands of abandoned crab traps that litter Louisiana’s coastal waterways.

Louisiana Sea Grant, a coastal advocacy and research group based at LSU, has received a $40,000 federal grant to lead the project. The money comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Louisiana leads the nation in the number of commercial blue crab fishermen, with more than 2,500 license holders who have no limit on the number of traps they can operate, Louisiana Sea Grant says in a news release. Some commercial crabbers run as many as 800 to 2,000 traps each.

In addition, Louisiana has more than 6,600 licensed recreational crab fishermen who can operate 10 traps each.

Between commercial and recreational crabbers, there can be more than 66,000 traps in the water, the group says.

“On average, 130 traps per crabber are lost each year due to storms, accidents and intentional abandonment,” Sea Grant says. “The result is in an estimated 11 million crabs lost to ghost fishing by derelict traps. Other fish, such as red drum, black drum and summer flounder also can get stuck in the traps.

Read the full story at Houma Today