Destination Dixie Crossroads!
A little background for your visit:
The Rock Shrimp Conservation Story
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Destination Dixie Crossroads!A little background for your visit: The Rock Shrimp Conservation Story
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Rock Shrimp are a tropical species of shrimp, found mainly off both coasts of Florida, Mexico’s Campeche Banks and in small isolated patches of bottom in the western Gulf of Mexico. Aptly named for their very hard shells, they are widely known and appreciated for their unique, lobster-like taste.
East Coast Rock Shrimp begin their lives, as do many other valuable commercially harvested species, in an offshore reef system, called the Oculina Reef, which is located off the coast of Brevard County. The Oculina corals grow along the inside edge of the north-flowing Gulfstream. The warm waters of the Gulfstream enable highly tropical coral animals to survive at lattitudes much further north than where coral is normally found. The reefs are extremely productive fishing areas known as the "Cones" or the "Steeples", as the coral animals form large spires, which have the appearance of an upside down ice cream cone, or a church steeple, on bottom recording equipment. The offshore waters east of Florida are the only place in the world where this unique coral grows.
Unlike many species of soft shrimp that are hatched at sea, then migrate through inlets and into estuarine waters for the first part of their lives, Rock Shrimp do not use inshore waters as a nursery. The juvenile shrimp spend the early part of their lives as drifting oceanic plankton. Within two weeks after hatching, the young Rock Shrimp become active swimmers. They grow rapidly, moving further offshore to deeper water where the currents of the Gulfstream sweep them north. Historically, Rock Shrimp could be found as far up the coast as Virginia. Years ago, large catches of Rock Shrimp occurred off the Georgia and Carolina Coasts. Due to overfishing, Rock Shrimp now rarely make it much further north than Cape Canaveral.
The Rock Shrimp industry had its beginnings in 1969, when boat-builder, Rodney Thompson, invented a machine that could split the Rock Shrimp, making them easier to crack open for removal of a large sand vein. The Rock Shrimp could then be broiled within their shells, just like a lobster. They quickly became popular as a local seafood delicacy. Rodney established a processing plant at Port Canaveral, where Tarpon Springs Native, Sam Vona, and his sons operated a fleet of shrimp-boats that produced all of the Rock Shrimp that were processed at Thompson’s plant, Ponce Seafood. For the next ten years, Ponce Seafood produced about 10 million pounds of processed Rock Shrimp a year, employing dozens of women who cleaned the shrimp. Secure with their place in the fishery because Ponce Seafood was the only fish house that bought Rock Shrimp and they were the only providers, The Vona Family was careful to protect their resource, and they never fished in the Rock Shrimp nursery grounds within the Oculina Reefs.
Many other processing facilities were operating at that time, most of them located in coastal towns along the Gulf of Mexico. The processors were reluctant to use Rock Shrimp because of the intense amount of hand labor involved in their cleaning. Instead, the processors preferred to use huge machines, called Lathrams, to peel and de-vein Brown and White Shrimp. The Lathram machine uses a series of sandpaper coated rollers. Shrimp are washed down oscillating rollers, which pinch the shells of the shrimp. The pinching of the rollers eventually works the outer shell of the shrimp free from the shrimp meat, and the empty shell slips through the rollers, leaving the cleaned meat on top. The peeled shrimp are popular in restaurants, where they are used in stir-fry dishes, soups, salads and Calabash bars.
In the mid-1980’s Pascagula Ice Company in Pascagula, Mississippi became the first company to modify a Lathram machine so that it could peel Rock Shrimp. By increasing the diameter and adding heavier sandpaper to the rollers, Pascagula Ice was able to utilize the Lathram machines to crush the hard shells of Rock Shrimp, exposing the sweet lobster like meats. Pascagula Ice was then able to seriously undercut the price of peeled and de-veined soft shrimp with peeled Rock Shrimp as they could purchase Rock Shrimp much cheaper than soft shrimp. The other processing companies were quick to follow Pascagula Ice’s lead, and they too modified their Lathrams to process Rock Shrimp.
Dozens of trawlers headed for Florida’s East Coast, and soon Sam Vona and his sons were surrounded by Gulf shrimpboats. Some of the super-trawlers were quite large, 110 feet long and capable of dragging four 60’ flat nets at one time. The bigger boats could catch and freeze more than 5,000 pounds of shrimp a day. Fishing pressure on Rock Shrimp intensified. Every year more boats arrived, lured by the easy money to be made fishing in the productive Rock Shrimp grounds. Catches peaked in 1991, when 40 million pounds of Rock Shrimp crossed the docks in Florida.
Unable to withstand the pressure, Rock Shrimp catches declined at a rapid rate. Desperate to maintain the flow of money, the super-trawlers moved further south and into the juvenile shrimp grounds, causing irreparable damage to the fragile Oculina Reefs. Dragging nets with heavy chains, they plowed through the coral, creating paths they called "goat trails" that criss-crossed the sides of the steeples. Modern technology (Plotters, global positioning systems and color scopes that showed the bottom contours more clearly than the old paper recorders) gave shrimpers the ability to safely drag in the same paths, reducing the chance of hanging, and losing, their nets in the coral.
Faced with having to get the Rock Shrimp while they could before they were gone for the year, the smaller shrimpers followed the super-trawlers into the nursery grounds. Operating ever closer to the time the juvenile Rock Shrimp first showed up each year, shrimpers shoveled thousands of pounds of small dead Rock Shrimp over the side as they culled out the few marginally marketable ones to bring to shore. Rock Shrimp disappeared off the Carolinas and Georgia, as it was impossible for the shrimp to slip through the gauntlet of boats to get there.
In 1994, recognizing that something had to change before Rock Shrimp became extinct, Rodney Thompson, now the owner of Dixie Crossroads Seafood Restaurant, began a campaign to stop destructive bottom trawling in the nursery grounds within the Oculina coral reefs, as well as institute a management plan for Rock Shrimp. Initially he was met with major resistance from captains, boat-owners and owners of fish houses, who denied that anything was wrong, and strongly resisted any efforts the government made to put controls on where they fished or who could join the fishery. Unable to procure enough Rock Shrimp to last all year, Dixie Crossroads began to run out of them every spring. Catch rates continued to crash at an alarming rate, and in 2000, less than three million pounds of Rock Shrimp were offloaded in Florida.
Finally realizing that their livelihoods truly were at stake, the people who depend on Rock Shrimp became more supportive. In 2001, a new precedent was set when, under Rodney’s guidance, they sat down together to draw up a management plan, which the South Atlantic Fisheries Council unanimously approved. This was the first time a southern group of fishermen not only agreed that management was necessary---they produced their own blueprint for doing so.
No longer can trawlers drag through the nursery grounds in the Oculina Reefs. No additional boats may enter the Rock Shrimp fishery. Only time will tell whether their plan was drawn in time to save the stocks of this unique little hard-shelled delicacy, the "shrimp that tastes like lobster."
2005 - Proposed Oculina Marine Sanctuary