I love seafood, but I eat it quite rarely. About a third of my old Department did fisheries and aquaculture science so I’ve seen many seminars and Thesis defenses on the topic and am quite aware of the problems with the world’s fisheries stocks.
I also prefer freshwater fish – I grew up on the Danube and my Mom fixes the best Fish Soup in the history of the Universe.
But, if you like seafood and you want to eat shrimp occasionally, yet you want to act in an environmentally responsible way, you need to know quite a lot about ecology, about behavior and natural history of shrimp, about the methods of harvesting and/or farming shrimp, about the way shrimp are processed and marketed. Armed with all that information, you’ll know where, when, how, how often and from whom to buy shrimp. It is not easy to find all that informaiton, but now you can find it all in one place.
Mark H (better known around science blogs as the person running the Biomes Blog), as a part of his marvelous Marine Life Series, has put it all together here.
He even provides a recipe at the end, which looks promising – I may try to use it one day, once I figure out how to find environmentaly not-so-bad shrimp around here.