Abstract

Whether in prawn cocktail, shrimp gumbo, or grilled on the barbeque, you’ve probably eaten shrimp lots of times. It’s the most common seafood in the US. An American eats on average 4 pounds of it every year!

While we know that shrimp is a popular seafood, we wanted to find out how important it was in supporting other valuable fish species in the Gulf of Mexico.

We studied the relationship between the abundance of shrimp and the fish that eat them and found that there was a statistical link between the two. Although we cannot conclude that this is entirely due to the abundance of shrimp, we believe that our research shows that shrimp are a really important prey for these fish species.