Shrimp boat towed away after it ran aground near Flagler Beach
A shrimp boat that was stranded on Beverly Beach, near Flagler Beach, on Sunday was towed away on Tuesday morning.
- Georgia shrimp is often misrepresented on restaurant menus, with genetic testing revealing a majority of Savannah restaurants serving foreign shrimp.
- The Georgia shrimping industry is declining, facing competition from cheaper imports, impacting packing houses and dock access for shrimpers.
- A climate change-driven disease called black gill, caused by a ciliate microorganism, is affecting shrimp, particularly the summer brown shrimp stock.
This coverage is made possible through a partnership between WABE and Grist, a nonprofit environmental media organization.
Shrimp are the quintessential Georgia seafood: the central ingredient of a Lowcountry boil, the subject of an annual festival on Jekyll Island, ubiquitous on coastal menus. But often, it turns out, the shrimp on those menus isn’t from Georgia. Genetic testing on the shrimp at 44 Savannah restaurants recently revealed that 34 of them were actually serving foreign shrimp.
But labels on local menus are just the tip of the iceberg―or the crunchy tip of the shrimp tail―when it comes to current challenges for the shrimp industry.
It’s also grappling with an emergent, climate-driven disease that scientists have only recently cracked, and economic headwinds that are unlikely to be solved by simply slapping a tariff on foreign shrimp.
“The shrimp industry in Georgia is…really declining,” said Marc Frischer, a professor at the University of Georgia’s Skidaway Institute of Oceanography. “We’re actually at risk of losing it.”
Only a couple hundred active shrimp boats remain in Georgia, compared to more than a thousand a few decades ago. Shrimpers in other south Atlantic states and the Gulf of Mexico are similarly struggling to compete with foreign imports.
In an effort to boost the industry in Georgia, Republican Jesse Petrea, a state representative from Savannah, sponsored a bill in the state legislature this year to require restaurants to disclose the origin of their shrimp.
“You got pictures of shrimp boats on the wall, and you’re serving Indian shrimp,” Petrea said. “Some people would say, ‘Well, but they’re cheap.’ They are, but at what cost?”
‘I’ll pay more for domestic shrimp’
American waters simply don’t have enough shrimp or shrimpers to replace foreign imports completely, but Petrea hopes clearer labeling can help domestic shrimp take over a little more of the market to keep shrimpers in business.
“I’ll pay a little more for domestic shrimp, and we all should recognize we have to pay a little more,” he said.
Petrea’s legislation didn’t pass this year, but he said he plans to bring it back next year. Alabama passed a similar law last year, and Louisiana and Mississippi already have shrimp labeling requirements.
But shrimpers’ problems go beyond what shrimp restaurants choose to buy.
“There’s a lot of packing houses closing down,” said Charlie Phillips, who owns a seafood packing operation and a restaurant in Townsend, Georgia.
And packers often control the docks. “A lot of the shrimpers are losing dock access. They don’t have a place to unload,” Phillips said.
Phillips doesn’t handle shrimp anymore, because just like shrimp boats, packing houses struggle to compete with cheaper imports.
Some in the industry are hoping that the Trump administration’s new tariffs will help by driving up the price of imported shrimp, but Phillips is skeptical.
“It’s still going to be cheaper than domestic,” he said. “For the most part, the customers are going to pay the price.”
On top of the financial challenges, shrimpers have faced a shrimp medical mystery for decades.
Shrimpers started reporting dark discoloration in shrimp gills in the ’90s. The condition came to be known as black gill and was soon prevalent from the Gulf to the Chesapeake Bay. The disease’s rise coincided with a sharp decline in shrimp catch numbers in Georgia, raising concerns that the two were linked.
Now, Frischer with UGA said, he and his fellow researchers know what causes black gill and much more about its impact on Georgia shrimp.
The condition is caused by a type of microorganism commonly found in water known as a ciliate, which Frischer said has probably always been there. But as climate change shifted ocean conditions, it gave rise to the new disease. That’s likely to happen over and over as the climate continues changing, he said.
“What’s happened in the shrimp here, black gill, we’re going to see a lot more stories like that in many, many more species,” Frischer said.
The good news is that Georgia’s shrimp population seems to be doing all right, despite black gill. While the overall catch has dropped, that’s more likely because there are so many fewer boats because of the economic forces Petrea and Phillips described. The amount of shrimp each boat brings in has remained steady―though Frischer said there isn’t great data from before the disease emerged. And as warmer water pushes the annual emergence of black gill earlier, it does appear to be hurting the summer stock of brown shrimp, one of two main species of shrimp caught by Georgia shrimpers.
But Frischer said there’s also a bigger lesson here about how fast science can respond to new diseases.
Black gill first appeared in the ’90s, research began in earnest in 2013, and scientists only now have it figured out. That’s decades from outbreak to understanding, and it’s too slow, Frischer said, especially as the ever-warming climate makes it likely that more new pathogens will keep emerging.
“We really need that basic research to deal with problems in something close to real time, not decades,” he said. “We don’t have decades.”
