WESTWEGO, La.– This evening in Louisiana, the spring inshore shrimp season will close. This is to protect the juvenile white shrimp, which is currently growing to more marketable sizes.
WGNO’s Kenny Lopez talked to a fisherman to find out what this means.
Louisiana fisherman— Bobby Rivere says the brown shrimp season is coming to a close this evening, and the white shrimp season won’t start up until mid-August.
“This gives the white shrimp time to grow. We don’t catch them too prematurely because right now they’ll be too small for consumption,” he said.
The white shrimp may be smaller right now because of our mild winter.
“We really don’t know why they are so small, they are late moving and with winter not being too cold they aren’t growing properly I guess,” Rivere said.
At Amy’s Seafood in Westwego they sell white shrimp of all sizes year-round.
“We buy them from big boats off shore, big double riggers, some people freeze the shrimp, some don’t. The deeper waters always carry all sizes of shrimp,” he said.
Something you may not know about shrimp is that they will bury themselves all the way in the mud, the entire length of their whisker, and the top of their whisker is where they breathe out of.
And for fishermen like Bobby, their livelihood depends on a successful shrimping season.
The Louisiana Department of Wildlife & Fisheries says the inshore waters between the Mississippi and Texas state lines will close.