Bottom-feeders
The creepy, crawly bottom-feeders of Hood Canal
Face it, fisherpersons. Those crustaceous spot shrimp you crave are among the creepiest creatures ever to crawl the depths of Puget Sound and Hood Canal.
Look at them. Six inches of iridescent-orange cartilage, bristling with two-dozen flailing spines, legs and antennae, not to mention those beady, black, insect-like eyes.
Yet there you are with your new black, plastic coated traps, 300-foot coils of line and cases of canned catfood, lining up at the boat-launch ramps at Brinnon or Quilcene, waiting your turn to launch your 18-footer and set off in search of the elusive, butt-ugly Hood Canal spot shrimp.
For the May 5 season opener, there were more than 1,500 boats, and some 3000 fishermen out there. There were jolly millworkers from Everett or PA in their ragged Seahawks caps. There were Seattle lawyers decked out in Patagonia fleece. There were college kids skipping class for a day on the water, followed by an evening at the Geoduck Tavern.
And there were hundreds of gray-haired white guys who have convinced themselves that, despite shelling out $100 or more for gear, bait, an engine tune-up and gas, they are somehow living off the land.
That would be me. I have hunted the Hood Canal shrimp. A few years ago, I ventured out with a couple of pals, who deployed a veritable arsenal of pots, each armed with 300 feet of line, and baited with a slimy, smelly concoction of Fishermen’s Platter cat food and liquid fish fertilizer, scooped into plastic containers riddled with holes.
We got our limit in a few hours, beached the boat, gorged ourselves on fresh shrimp and washed it down with beer.
I was hooked, or potted. More recently, I’ve dropped my pots in Discovery Bay, but with little return for my effort. Wrong cat food, I suppose.
This year, the Disco Bay shrimp stocks are so slim that the state won’t allow any shrimping at all. But sports fishermen alone will haul some 40 tons – 85,000 pounds – of spot shrimp from Hood Canal. And biologists say that catch will hardly make a dent in shrimp populations.
So what’s with that? Why would spot shrimp prosper in Hood Canal, spiced by thousands of leaky septic tanks, while they avoid the relatively pristine waters of Discovery Bay? What do they have that we don’t?
Sewage perhaps? Remember, these are some of the strangest crustaceans in the sea. They are bottom feeders. They spend their lives crawling around the seafloor, feeding off dead and decaying fish. They thrive on garbage.
Or so it would seem.
Spot shrimp, known to scientists as Pandalus platyceros, are the most common of about 80 species of shrimp that crawl around local waters. So it stands to reason they constitute the majority of the local commercial and sports shrimp catch. And they are the honored guests at the upcoming Brinnon Shrimpfest.
They can be found as deep as 1,000 feet, but shrimpers usually catch them in pots on the floor at depths of about 175 to 300 feet. Biologists tell us they are omnivorous, feeding on marine worms and plankton as well as dead fish and plants.
Biologists are still trying to understand their life cycle. Shrimp, we’re told, live four to five years, depending on whom you ask. While they spend most of their time on the bottom, they’ll swim up to shallower water in search of food.
They spawn in the late summer, and the eggs spend the winter attached to the female’s specialized legs. The juveniles hatch as tiny larvae in the early spring and drift with the currents while they feed and mature. By summer, they have developed all those bristling spines and legs and begin behaving like shrimp.
And that’s where things begin to get kinky. I wonder if all those happy weekend shrimpers would be so enthused if they knew that virtually every spot shrimp is a cross-dressing transvestite.
When it comes to sex, Pandalus platyceros has it both ways. They mature as males, and remain so for one or two seasons. Then, triggered by some unknown impulse, they are transformed into females. Thus endowed, they reproduce for one or two seasons, dying soon after their final brood hatches.
But it gets even more weird. If shrimp populations are stressed by overfishing or some natural event, those male shrimp may transform themselves to females even sooner. And studies suggest that some shrimp may skip their male phase altogether and spend their entire lives as females.
OK, fair enough. Whatever works for the shrimp works for the shrimper.
So off we go, one eye on the depth-sounder, looking for a reasonably flat bottom, about 200 feet deep. We concoct a pungent bait and strap it to the bottom of a two-foot square cage, each with two or more funnel shaped entrances that allow shrimp to crawl in, but not out. Then we lower the device to the bottom, marked at the surface with a yellow buoy. And then we wait.
It has been done so for generations. And it appears that, among other things, spot shrimp are slow learners, because it still works.
State biologists report that the shrimp continue to thrive in Hood Canal. This year, there were more boats, more people, more shrimp pots, and they caught a combined 46,000 pounds shrimp in the first day alone.
Because, at the end of the day, a plate of steamed Pandalus platyceros, a dab of cocktail sauce and a cold microbrew makes it easy to forget you’re feasting on a bottom-feeder.
