During a recent visit to the American Museum of Natural History, I walked through the Hall of Biodiversity and looked at a small but impressive exhibit on the effects of shrimp trawling. A museum exhibit on the devastating effects of trawling is not so unusual, but this exhibit also pointed out the environmental effects of shrimp farms. The exhibit explained:
Wild shrimp are caught by trawls - nets dragged along the seafloor that capture everything in their path. For every pound of shrimp caught, trawling can incidentally mangle or kill up to nine times as many non-targeted fishes, and countless other animals and plants, which are discarded as "bycatch." Farmed shrimp are raised in ponds built in cleared tropical mangrove forests. Coastal mangroves are the primary nursery and breeding grounds for countless wild ocean species. Their destruction reduces juvenile populations of many creatures - including those of the wild shrimp needed to stock the ponds.
The museum stops short of telling people not to eat shrimp, but I thought it was great that it took the extra step of telling people that farmed shrimp is not an environmentally sustainable alternative to shrimp trawling.
Of course, this was not an animal rights exhibit. Regardless of whether other animals are killed and discarded as "bycatch," eating shrimp kills the shrimp. But this exhibit will hopefully affect people and if people eat fewer animal products because they're worried about the bycatch, that will be a good thing.
Photograph © Doris Lin 2009, licensed to About.com, Inc.
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Thanks for sharing this. I think this is a great exhibit, in that it presents the facts and lets people make their own decisions. I don’t eat shrimp, and one of the reasons is because it is too difficult to tell if it’s caught without harm to other marine life (and most likely, it isn’t). When I tell people that, they always ask about what harm comes from eating farmed shrimp. Your post presents that information in a nice, concise way!