Starving Shrimp Make for Tough Egg Harvest

BY KRISTEN MOULTEN
THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE

A shrimper rakes brine shrimp eggs into a vacuum that collects the eggs in a holding tank on the shrimp boat. (Al Hartmann/ The Salt Lake Tribune)

    LAKESIDE -- It's day two of what's shaping up to be a dismal brine shrimp harvest, and Mark McDougal doesn't want to lose out on a single streak of shrimp eggs.
    "Mako, Mako, you want me in there?" McDougal barks into the radio connecting him to Salt Creek Inc.'s 18 other boats on the water and two planes in the sky this day.
    One of Salt Creek's boats has been sitting on a streak, but doesn't have the muscle -- a big orange ball that denotes a state license -- to keep interloping companies 300 yards away. McDougal throttles his 50-foot shallow-draft fishing boat to 45 mph, but arrives just after a competitor and is too late to claim the eggs, floating like powdered chocolate on a 10-foot-wide swath of water.
    "You've gotta boogie and he's got a ball," McDougal radios the first Salt Creek boat. "Let's let 'em have it."
    This trial attorney-turned-brine shrimper is not happy as he turns his boat around in the rose-colored water of the north part of the lake.
    "When I say 'break, break, break,' everybody pay attention," McDougal admonishes the rest of Salt Creek's fleet. He questions why one boat switched to a new radio channel and he chews out a spotter pilot, in the clear October sky above, for not warning of the competing boat's approach.
    But McDougal is less a harsh fishing captain than a coach. And to him, it's the cat-and-mouse game, the rogue sport of competing for precious brine shrimp eggs, that makes it a business worth clinging to.
    "For me, that's a lot of it," says McDougal, who lives in Taylorsville. "I know it's not a money-making operation this year."
    In fact, it's getting harder and harder for the Utah brine shrimp industry to make money.
    The salinity in the Great Salt Lake is out of whack, and it's ruining what had become, during the past 15 years, a lucrative little industry that attracted international investment and sales to Utah.
    Fewer than 200 are employed year-round in the industry, but the shrimp eggs they pull from the Great Salt Lake are considered the premier source of nutrients for the world's booming aquaculture industry, primarily prawn farms.

    Brine shrimp, which look like tan pieces of lint the size of mosquitos, die off entirely in the frigid waters of the lake each winter. But their eggs -- actually shell-encased cysts -- can live for decades awaiting the right conditions to hatch. When temperatures and winds are right, the eggs float to the surface in strips, a few feet to several miles long.
    The brine shrimpers use oil-containment booms -- long, sectioned strips
   of vinyl about 2 feet deep -- to corral the floating eggs. They tighten the wrap and pull it close to the fishing boat over a span of hours.
    Eventually, the eggs can be vacuumed off the surface with a long-handled, rake-like contraption attached to a hose.
    Thick, shrimpy-smelling ooze called biomass, which includes empty shells, brine shrimp and algae as well as the prized eggs, is pumped into porous bags that hold 2,000 pounds. The bags are transferred to bigger boats or trucks by cranes.
    The eggs are later separated out, dried, canned and sold to aquaculture farms, primarily in Asia and South America. When the time is right, the eggs are hatched out and the young brine shrimp are fed to prawns and other fish raised to satisfy the rising demand of diners worldwide.
    The high quality of the Great Salt Lake's brine shrimp has meant prices as high as $20 and $30 per pound for eggs, a pretty price that nearly trebled the number of brine shrimping companies on the lake between 1992 and 1996.
    Since then, 32 companies have been paying $10,000 each for the 79 certificates of registration (COR) every year. Boats with CORs get a big orange ball to show they can stake a claim to a 300-yard radius of eggs.
    Harvesters can take other boats out on the water, but those can harvest only within the 300-yard radii claimed by their own COR boats.
    Shrimpers say informal mergers of companies mean a handful of big operations now control most of the 79 CORs, although about a dozen are held by small operators. Clay Perschon, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources' Great Salt Lake project leader, says new rules being written by the attorney general's office will allow the formal consolidation of companies owning the CORs.
    Now those companies are scrambling after a declining resource because the brine shrimp are starving.
    The algae they feed on is unable to thrive in too little or too much salt, and right now, the Great Salt Lake has both, says Perschon.
    The southern arm, fed by river water and separated by the Union Pacific causeway, is 8.5 percent salt. The north arm is 25 to 26 percent salt, or nearly saturated, says Perschon. The algae, and therefore the brine shrimp, need water that is 13 percent to 18 percent salt, he said.
    Declining numbers of shrimp forced shorter harvesting seasons the past two years. But this was the first year the state allowed no harvest on the south arm of the lake, which had been the most productive this decade.
    The division threw the brine shrimpers a bone -- harvest in the briny north, where eggs are scant and of dubious quality.
    "Anything's better than nothing," says John Willener, a 61-year-old shrimper who is selling his operation to Salt Creek.
    "The big boys have deep pockets. They're absorbing the little guys who don't want to take the risk."
    There have been a number of mergers in the industry -- McDougal merged his company, ABC, into Salt Creek, for instance -- and the shrimpers have been forming harvesting and processing cooperatives to take advantage of economies of scale, said Don Leonard, spokesman for the industry group, Utah Artemia Association.
    "Industries in stress tend to take steps to be more efficient. This industry is no different," Leonard says.
    In the first two weeks of harvest this fall, the shrimpers took just more than 700,000 pounds of biomass, a mere shadow of earlier harvests. In the halcyon years of 1995 and 1996, shrimpers took nearly 30 million pounds from the lake.
    Assuming 40 percent of the biomass turns out to be marketable eggs, that will amount to 280,000 pounds, barely enough to pay the boats' fuel. "It's bleak for these guys ... really, really bleak," says Leonard.
    McDougal, who got into brine shrimping when lawyering didn't give him enough outdoor adventure, now worries his sons won't be able to join him out on the water.
    He and other brine shrimpers are among the biggest advocates for punching holes or otherwise fixing the 21-mile-long railroad causeway that's blamed for causing the salinity imbalance.
    Says McDougal: "I can't sound the trumpet loud enough. If they don't fix the causeway, there may be no more brine shrimping."