Shrimp Publication!

Remember WAY back in the day when I shared these photos of shrimp embryos?

spot shrimp and coonstripe shrimp embryos

I was processing shrimp collected from different sites around Port Valdez for hydrocarbon analysis. Polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) are simply compounds made up of hydrogen and carbon that occur in crude oil. They = not so good for human consumption, or for animals, or for nature in general (see the Exxon Valdex Oil Spill). So this project looked at whether or not shrimp collected near oil tanker operations were safe to eat. My role was properly dissecting the shrimp and separating them by body part - tails (the most-often eaten item), heads (sucked on - not my style), and eggs (oy, I'll get to this one). And now the results have been published! Woo!

pink shrimp embryos

Let's cut to the chase: the majority of everything was safe with the small exception of eggs! ... And here's where I get on my soapbox: we shouldn't be harvesting reproductive females in any fishery that we hope can be sustainable. The lobstermen on the East Coast know this and v-notch the tails of reproductive female lobsters before returning them so that (a) they have a chance to hatch those delicious babies and (b) even when they're not gravid (showing eggs on the underside of their tails), it's known that these gals can get the job done for future years of successful harvests. Long story short - you shouldn't be eating the potentially tainted shrimp eggs from Port Valdez anyway! (Honestly, most shrimp you buy in general are terrible [high bycatch in trawl shrimping, pollution from farmed shrimp, slavery in shrimp processing, etc.] so unless you or your friend are catching shrimp using pots, you should just avoid 'em.)

(Disclaimer: that's just my opinion, well thought out though it may be, and doesn't reflect the opinion of any organization for which I've done research.)

Gettin' crabby in Oregon (part 1)

It's time for another adventure! Let's

I mentioned in the last post that I was headed to Oregon for a wedding. It was beautiful and touching and just plain fun! The next day we took advantage of our proximity to the coast and headed out for a walk near the Yaquina Bay State Recreation Site. I wasn't expecting to see much other than waves, sand, and sun, but my friend Alice spotted this little fellow:

a sandy-colored smooth bay shrimp

We thought it was dead since it was just lying in the wash zone of the beach. Either my husband or Alice went to pick it up (I don't remember who) and it flipped away from us! We all gave a jump and a scream, then picked it up and put it back in the ocean! It was a good start to a fun beach walk!

This little shrimp isn't just your average cocktail ingredient. Oh no, he's got quite the story. Smooth bay shrimp (Lissograngon stylirostris) host a nasty little parasite named Argeia pugettensis, a bopyrid isopod. The isopod will attach itself to a shrimp's gills and use the shrimp's carapace as an extra layer of shelter. The first one to attach to the shrimp develops into a female.

"Last one to the shrimp is a rotten egg male!" - parasitic isopod

Any subsequent parasite to enter that shrimp's gills will become male and fertilize the female parasite's eggs. Once the little larvae hatch, they head out in search of an intermediate host (namely a calanoid copepod) to ruin someone else's day develop further until it can start the whole process over again by swimming up into a shrimp's gills.

"Gross Steve, you've got something on your back!" - Larry the shrimp

"AH! Larry, you've got something on YOUR back!" - Steve the shrimp

 "AHHH!" - Larry and Steve

"AHHHHHH!" - all the shrimp EVERYWHERE!

Luckily for the shrimp we found, it wasn't infected with anything.

Yet.

(Dun-dun-dun!)

Stay tuned to see more of our beach discoveries!

Sitka Spot Shrimp in Prince William Sound

I spent the first week of December on a boat in Prince William Sound looking for whales! I mean, can someone pinch me? That degree is really paying off!

(thanks to Jess from the Prince William Sound Science Center for this photo)

Anyways, I was out on the Auklet for a long term monitoring project and our first night out we had so many Sitka spot shrimp!

What a catch! And they're all headed too... weird...

No, they're not a new invasive species - they were just purchased for dinner.

Amazing! Thank you again to Gerald for feeding me right!

Spot shrimp range into Prince William Sound normally (remember this project where I processed spot shrimp, coonstripe shrimp, and pink shrimp from PWS?), but the ones we ate were caught off of Sitka. The fishery is great because they are mainly caught in pots meaning fishermen aren't dredging up a ton of bycatch in order to land these tasty crustaceans!

After polishing off all the shrimp, we used their shells to lure any fish under the boat toward our camera. And let me tell you, the pollock seemed to enjoy the shrimp just as much as the humans!

the smelly allure of shrimp carapaces!

fishy action caught in Rocky Bay!

(photo courtesy of Dave Janka) 

It was an amazing trip and I'm so glad I was able to nerd out not only with whales and fish but with my beloved crustaceans too!

Birthday Prawn

This past October marked my 30th birthday (30!!!), and my wonderful advisor-turned-friend gave me lots of crustacean-themed gifts! The most beautiful of them was this apron featuring a brilliant prawn:

I'm sure there's a better picture of the apron,

but I also wanted to give a shout-out to the Tamones!

Here are some fun facts about this shrimp, Macrobrachium hancocki:

It is a native of the Galapagos Islands.

It lives in freshwater, unlike these prawns we looked at before.

It looks very similar to its cousin, M. crenulatum, but is less spiky.

M. hancocki has a little square patch of non-spiky furryness on its second pereopod

where M. crenulatum would have had spikes all up in that orange square

(from here)

Giving a whole new meaning to "shrimp"

Last week I shared some microscope photos of a megalopae hermit crab, which I was pretty excited about (there was high-fiving involved). But that reminded me of these little cuties that one of my bosses snapped:

almost-babies!

They're shrimp embryos! I had the fun opportunity to dissect several shrimp from Prince William Sound and Mark Carls took advantage of the presence of gravid females to get some sweet shots. The picture above is of spot shrimp embryos, but we also saw coonstripe and pink shrimp.

coonstripe shrimp embryos

a closer view on those coonstripe babies

pink shrimp embryos still attached to their mother's pleopod

Their eyes are developed, but what I found especially neat was all of their little markings! (Remember seeing shrimp chromatophores from this post?) Once they grow up, each shrimp would have looked like this:

spot shrimp (Pandalus platyceros)

note the white spots on its first and fifth abdominal segments

(and try to ignore the white stripes on their carapace...)

coonstripe shrimp (Pandalus hypsinotis)

these guys have dark strips on their abdomen and

a bigger, arched carapace compared to the other shrimp 

pink shrimp (Pandalus borealis)

pink pink pink!

Those embryos were definitely the shrimpiest tiniest little shrimp I've ever seen!

"meep!" - spot shrimp embyros

Someone get the cocktail sauce!

We've got A LOT of prawns to eat!

prawn-filled beach in Coronel, Chile

Just kidding. A tide of death has swept Chilean beaches, covering them with thousands of dead prawns and hundreds of dead crabs. Local fishermen are quick to point their fingers at the power plants nearby, which use seawater as a coolant, but an actual cause is not yet known. Researchers are looking into water temperatures and oxygen levels: there may have been an area of hypoxia that was too large for the critters to escape (hypoxia = low oxygen = hard to breath!).

poor little crustaceans

This isn't the first time we've seen a wave of dead crabs wash ashore. Remember the megalopae in Phuket? They may have washed ashore due to hypoxic conditions. And the devil crabs on the Thanet Coast, UK? They may have suffered from a sudden drop in water temperature (although scientists also initially considered bitter crab disease as the culprit). Hopefully Chilean researchers will get to the bottom of their prawn/crab die-off for, if nothing else, the peace of mind of the fishermen. Do you have any theories?

Out of Town!

Hey there! I've been a bit busy with work, but don't worry, I didn't forget about Snow Crab Love! I was out of town for a bit to attend a meeting in Seattle (for a Gulf of Alaska project which is also funded by North Pacific Research Board! Hollah!), so while I was there I made sure to eat lots of crustaceans!

you know you want to throw a fish around!

What was my most invertebrate-filled meal? That would have to be the bowl of Dungeness crab (Metacarcinus magister) and oyster (I don't know which species) chowder with half of an Oregon bay shrimp (Pandalus jordani) sandwich! I went with some friends to Pike Place Chowder in Post Alley (no, we did not put gum on the Gum Wall. I can't believe I missed it!) and was not disappointed. The chowder was warm and delicious - perfect for a sunny spring day in Seattle - and the sandwich was loaded with little pink shrimp!

soup and a shrimpy sammie!

I've shared before that I don't normally eat shrimp because of the overwhelming bycatch that is often caught in trawl fisheries, but the Oregon bay shrimp fishery has its act together. The fishery runs from April 1 - October 31, which avoids the reproductive season of December through March (yay for making shrimp babies!). Best of all is that they use bycatch reduction devices (BRD) which allow fish to escape the net while shrimp are caught!

See how that lingcod and canary rockfish were able to just swim out and on their way instead of being smooshed into the codend with all the shrimp? Totally awesome! The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife have a couple other videos of how BRDs work which are worth checking out here. What fishermen end up with is lots and lots of shrimp with few fish to sort out rather than a deckload of fish with a few shrimp scattered around!

catch vs bycatch:
just two small bins of non-targeted fish compared to all those baskets of shrimp!
(this is probably the happiest picture I've seen in terms of shrimp fishery bycatch -
the rest can be just heartbreaking)

This fishery is so good that the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch program gave it the "Best Choice" label and the Blue Ocean Institute gave its bycatch a score of 3.75 out of 4! That, my friends, means happy eating for this gal!

Flamingos for Father's Day?

Yes, I realize it's weird to talk about flamingos on a crab blog. And I also realize it's weird to bring up pink flamingos specifically for Father's Day. But you know what? I'm weird, and so is my dad! (See here for video proof.)

You see, I grew up with 3 older sisters - that's 5 girls total (including my mom) in a house with 1 full bath! So my dad decided to call dibs on the basement bathroom for his own peace and quiet. To decorate this oh-so-manly half bath, he painted it pink and adorned it with a pink flamingo lawn ornament and pink flamingo plunger! (There may have been other flamingo-themed things in there, but those two stick out in my memory.)

pink flamingos on parade

(here they come, hippity hoppity)

Why flamingos? I don't know. BUT I do know why flamingos are pink: they eat BRINE SHRIMP (Artemia sp.)! Crustacean connection!!

salty fellows: Artemia salina

The thing in these little brine shrimp that makes flamingos so pink is astaxanthin, a carotenoid (pigment) that also turns crabs red and salmon flesh, well, salmon. Ben Daly figured that out when he was raising all those little baby red king crabs (Paralithodes camtschaticus) in Seward, AK: hatchery-reared red king crabs weren't as red as wild-caught kings, but diets supplemented with astaxanthin changed their carapace hues, and increased their survival! And increased survival is always a good goal for your kids hatchlings, right dads?

HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!

Shrimpday?

OK, OK, I know Fridays are supposed to be for the crabs. But while I was reading up on methyl farnesoate research in shrimp, I stumbled upon the common name of this species:

Banana Shrimp

Fenneropenaeus merguiensis

This shrimp is bananas!

B-A-N-A-N-A-S!

Can you believe it!?! Banana + Shrimp! Two delicious things come together for one awesome animal! I read about them in a paper (Kuballa et al., 2007) looking at different isoforms of farnesoic acid O-methyl transferare (FaMeT), which may regulate methyl farnesoate synthesis (there are multiple forms of FaMeT! Go science!).

note: his spoon's NOT too big!

Banana shrimp (or prawns. You pick.) occur naturally off Australia, some South Pacific islands, along southeast Asia, India, and Pakistan (see a map here). They are also used for aquaculture, and, as these things tend to happen, have been found "invading" certain regions like the Mediterranean. (Oh, farm-raised shrimp. *sigh*) The wild ones aren't always a safe bet either, for human consumption that is, as some have had heavy metals in their tissues (think mercury, copper, and lead), and while some levels have been within safe limits for people, other have not! Yikes!

banana shrimp go postal!

On that appetizing note, I can't talk about banana shrimp without sharing a banana + shrimp recipe. Truth: I haven't tried this yet. I don't eat much shrimp because of how unsustainable a lot of shrimp fisheries are, but if you check with Blue Ocean Institute's seafood guide, it has a few shrimp fisheries that are A-OK!

Shrimp and Banana Curry

(from About.com)

Ingredients
curry sauce:
6 tbsp butter
6 tbsp flour
2 tsp curry powder
1 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
2 1/2 cups chicken broth

the rest:
4 firm bananas, peeled
1 tbsp + 2 tsp butter, melted
1 1/2 lbs shrimp, shelled, cleaned, and cooked

Directions
1. For the sauce, melt the 6 tbsp of butter in a medium saucepan. Add the flour, curry powder, salt, and pepper and stir until smooth. Add chicken broth slowly and stir continuously until the sauce has thickened but remains smooth.

2. Preheat the oven to 375 F.

3. Place the bananas in a baking dish and brush with the melted butter. Pour half of the curry sauce over the bananas and bake for 15-18 minutes.

4. Add the cooked shrimp to the saucepan with the remaining sauce and heat through.

5. Serve the curried shrimp and bananas on a bed of rice (might I suggest cooked in coconut milk instead of water??), and enjoy! [serves 4]

Let me know how it turns out if you try this banana-shrimp recipe!

Crabs are taking over AFS

It's that time of year again: the American Fisheries Society Alaska Chapter meeting! This year it's being held in our very own Juneau (yay! No flights for me!!). What's that you say, will there be any crab talks? Yes, oh yes.

Highlights of the meeting:

Crustaceans Are Cooler: Fisheries and Biology

of Crabs and Shrimps in Alaska

Chair: Ginny Eckert, UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences

Wednesday 9:45 – 11:25 am and 1:00 - 2:40 pm

Defining Genetic Population Structure of Snow Crab (Chionoecetes opilio) in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas - Greg Albrecht

Variability in Reproductive Potential of Eastern Bering Sea Snow Crab, Chionoecetes opilio, in Relation to Spawning Stock Demography -  Joel Webb

Reproductive Indices of Male Snow Crab Chionoecetes opilio from the Eastern Bering Sea - Marilyn Zaleski (me)

Alaskan Crab Fisheries: An Historical Perspective - Courtney Lyons

Factors Influencing Snow Crab Recruitment: A Comparison Across Ecosystems - Laurinda Marcello

Red King Crab Paralithodes camtschaticus Larval Supply, Settlement Timing, and Benthic Habitat Structure - Jodi Pirtle

Growth Physiology of Juvenile Red King Crab Paralithodes camtschaticus Reared Under Laboratory Conditions - Miranda Westphal

Recruitment Mechanisms of Eastern Bering Sea Tanner Crab, Chionoecetes bairdi - Jon Richar

Crabs Are Not so Cool When it Comes to Management - Shareef Siddeek *

Should Some Minimum Size Limits be Amended? – Pribilof Islands Tanner Crab - Bill Bechtol *

* heavy hitters! (all the rest are student presenters)

Evolutionary/ Genetics Perspectives on Alaska Fisheries

Chair: Megan McPhee, UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences

Thursday 8:40 – 9:00 am

Alaskan red king crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus) population genetic structure - Scott Vulstek

Dynamics of Marine Ecosystems

Chair: Gordon Kruse, UAF School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences

Thursday 10:35 - 10:55 am

Recolonization, Prey Selection and Resource Competition by Sea Otters, Enhydra lutris, in Southern Southeast Alaska - Zac Hoyt (This one doesn't sound crabby, but Zac is looking at sea otter predation on commercially valuable inverts including Dungeness crabs and Tanner crabs.)

Poster Session

Thursday from 11:55 am – 1:45 pm

Populations of ocean shrimp Pandalus jordani in the Gulf of Alaska - Aaren Ellsworth

The decorator dilemma: How Oregonia gracilis chooses what to wear - Greg Albrecht (student); Brenda Konar

Effects of larval rearing temperature on large-scale production of red king crab (Paralithodes camtschaticus) - James Swingle; Benjamin Daly (student); Jeff Hetrick; Ginny Eckert

Blue Genes: Population structure and paternity in blue king crabs (Paralithodes platypus) - Jennifer Stoutamore (student)

Long-term intra-cohort distributional shifts in the eastern Bering Sea population of Tanner crab, Chionoecetes bairdi - Jon Richar (student); Gordon Kruse

Seasonal gonad development of Parastichopus californicus in Southeast Alaska--Jessica Davila (student) (I know this isn’t crabby, but it speaks to me.)

I hope to see you there!

Happy Belated Alaska Day!

What did you do to celebrate Alaska Day? I staged chromatophores on shrimp with the Biology 310 lab I'm TA-ing! Exciting, right?

the carapace of a shrimp (Pendalus sp.) with its chromatophores (the orange starbursts)

Chromatophores are pigment-containing cells that generate shell color for crustaceans. Some crustaceans can change color to match their backgrounds (cephalopods are also awesome at this!). And, like all things interesting (to me), chromatophores are under hormonal control!

To stage the chromatophores, the students looked at shrimp under dissecting scopes and determined how dispersed the pigments were. A dot is considered stage 1, but the more branching and dispersed the chromatophore, the greater its stage (with 5 being the most dispersed).

more pretty chromatophores!  I'd stage these as 3's and 4's

Pineapples!!!! Really, chromatophore pineapples!!!!

These were from Kevin's physiology project last year.

I'm not sure how I'd stage these, but probably stage AWESOME!

Not specifically Alaskan, but fun nonetheless. Still, let's take this time to appreciate some of the many wonderful Alaskan crabs:



Southeast Alaska intertidal crabs!

Dungeness crab, hermit crab,

mud crab (the purple thing), and red king crab



Happy Alaska Day!