Our Education Coordinator, Sasha, came up with and wrote this year’s series focusing on aquaculture. However, she moved away this summer after missing the mountains while living here on the Eastern Shore. The article she wrote for September is the last in the series that she completed before she left.
Hiking can lead to a number of surprising discoveries. You’re probably thinking that surely I must mean a cool animal sighting, or a semi-precious stone discovery, or a funky plant. For certain these surprises are always welcome, but that’s not what I’m talking about. One of the most surprising–and strangest–hiking discoveries I encountered was while trekking through the remote mountains of Tokushima in Japan.
The designated trail was part recreational path, part abandoned town road, and part “figure it out yourself how to cross this river.” Most things are pretty well maintained in Japan, so you’ll be hard-pressed to find something truly remote, but this was it. I saw a few older farmers hard at work among the scattered abandoned buildings, but otherwise there was no one else besides me and my hiking buddy.
We were on one of the abandoned town roads and were slowly making our way uphill up a paved street, wide enough for maybe one car. There was a convenience store to our left, with shuttered windows. A lone, rusty bike was leaning up against a vending machine, its once neon signage baked pale and matte in the sun. The small houses lining the other side of the street, while not dilapidated, stood quiet and slowly slumping with years of disuse.
Upon cresting the hill we came upon a square concrete building, its paint bleached of all color. The door unexpectedly opened directly as we passed, a man behind it. He looked to be about in his middle years, and was just as shocked to suddenly be in our space. We exchanged greetings, and he asked where we were from.
“America,” we told him. His eyes lit up. “Come, come! Come around the side. Let me show you what I’m working on. It’s too hot today. Do you need water?”
He ushered us down what was once an outdoor hallway. He explained that the building used to be a school, and that he was repurposing the abandoned school’s old pools for—have you guessed it yet?
Shrimp farming!
Learning how to swim in elementary school is a mandatory part of the curriculum in Japan, so even the smallest of elementary schools will usually have at least one pool. This school happened to have four. Two deep pools, and two shallow ones. The gentleman had his own infiltration pumps set up, and explained how he used the shallow pools to raise the juvenile shrimp, and once they got big enough, they were moved to the deep pools. As shrimp are much harder to see when they are young, the depth of the shallow pool was perfect for him to be able to better see and locate the small creatures.
This was the beginning of my awareness of shrimp aquaculture, and as it turns out, as this man showed us, one of the biggest advantages of shrimp aquaculture is that shrimp don’t need a lot of space. For the longest time, much of the shrimp Americans ate was imported mainly from Asia, but that is beginning to change quickly, in part because the demand for shrimp (like almost every seafood it seems) is growing. What makes shrimp production stand out from the rest is that it is growing exceedingly swiftly–about 10% annually–making shrimp one of the fastest growth rates in the aquaculture industry!
Currently, over half of the world’s shrimp production comes from aquaculture. The shrimp that are most commonly farmed are the Pacific white shrimp, the giant tiger prawn, and kuruma shrimp (the latter of which was what the Japanese gentleman had been raising!) The strategy for raising shrimp does not vary much, and what can be applied for shrimp in one country or for one species can be broadly applied to another.
Like a good majority of aquaculture, one of the challenges shrimp farmers have to keep in mind is the potential for outbreak of disease [1]. Shrimp in particular, don’t have much in the way of a highly developed immune system. In the same vein, however, shrimp are also relatively simple creatures, and unless there is an unpredictable environmental factor, once you find a system that works, their production is comparatively stable when looked at next to other aquaculture species like salmon or tuna (though of course not as stable as something like an oyster—which, tune in to next month’s newsletter for a closer look at that).
The most expensive component of shrimp farming currently is the cost of the feed. This is a relatively new factor, occurring within just the past few years, beginning with the first cancellation of the Peruvian anchovy fishery in 2023, which greatly reduced the production of fishmeal (or fish food.) Soy and wheat meals that are also used to feed shrimp have seen a sharp increase in price due to the Russia-Ukraine war, on top of the collapse of the Black Sea Grain Deal in 2023 (a deal that allowed the transportation of grains and other foodstuffs through the Black Sea) [2].
Although shrimp aquaculture isn’t talked about much, we actually used to have a very successful shrimp farm out of Hurlock county, here on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Marvesta Shrimp Farms was founded in 2002 and claimed sustainable, indoor practices completely free of antibiotics, hormones, chemicals, and preservatives [3]. The business thrived for about 10 years at their location, serving fresh shrimp to about 20 different restaurants, but although their quality and freshness was praised, the business eventually couldn’t produce enough shrimp to cover their costs.
The business eventually relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina where they turned from shrimp and started focusing on mussels. I mention it here because despite our seafood culture, there’s not a lot of aquaculture that Maryland has pioneered in state. Marvesta Shrimp Farms, for the time it lasted, was breaking ground locally.
That’s all for this month! The message of this article? Hiking sure can lead to some interesting and delicious discoveries.