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As a consequence of the great economic and institutional volatility experienced during the last two decades, Venezuela has registered low economic growth rates that hindered the development of a competitive non-oil export sector. One of the few exceptions is the emergence, expansion, and consolidation of the shrimp industry which is dominated by both national and international firms. Although the Venezuelan shrimp production has not attained the same importance as its counterparts in countries like China, Vietnam, and Thailand, it is among the most important regional players in that field in Latin America, behind countries such as Brasil, Ecuador, and Colombia. This chapter explores the competitiveness of the shrimp industry using cluster analysis. It highlights how the emerging shrimp cluster in Venezuela lacks the tools for cooperation between its producers and the support institutions that could enhance its productivity and guarantee its long-term consolidation.

This introductory chapter places the book's ethnographic study of Louisiana shrimp fishers in the context of the larger body of research on the dynamic relationships between occupational decline, community, and culture. It traces the evolving structure of the shrimping industry and its impact on the identity and culture of its current participants. It then turns to the crisis suffered by local shrimp fishers today: the increased supply import of foreign, farm-bred shrimp that has likewise increased consumer demand. From there the study narrows down by grouping the responses of domestic shrimp fishers to the import crisis into three categories: the “persisters” who remain in the industry despite the crisis, the “exiters” who have left the industry outright, and the “adaptive innovators,” who remain in the industry but change their practices to suit shifting economic conditions.

Many organisms living in the oceans or in salt lakes are hyporegulators, meaning that they maintain their body fluids hypo-osmotically to the external medium. Marine fish hyporegulate by drinking the external medium and transporting sodium and chloride ions outward across the gills. Marine reptiles and birds use salt glands in the head to transport hyperosmotic fluids outward. Marine mammals are able to produce hyperosmotic urine in the kidneys. Insects use portions of the hindgut to actively transport ions out of their hemolymph. Brine shrimp are the champion hyporegulators of the animal kingdom. They use salt glands to rid their bodies of the salts accumulated in waters many times more concentrated than the oceans.

This concluding chapter discusses the potential implications of the BP oil spill for the continuation of the shrimp fishing industry. While the degree to which the oil spill will impact the fishing industry is yet unknown, it has not affected how the fishers arrive at the fundamental decisions that they make in response to change. They go through a careful calculation of costs and benefits—both monetary and cultural—as they grapple with what their next move will be; but no matter the impetus for change, the outcomes remain the same: persisting is toil, exit is tragedy, and innovation is risky and unpredictable.

Dress warmly, hold your breath, and take a dive . . . You pierce the surface of Baikal at a soft angle and slip like the low rays of the high-latitude sun into a prism of liquid glass. The water molecules release their bonds with each other to embrace you. Sunlight follows you, wiggles, and scatters; the photons themselves become liquid. Sound becomes a liquid, too, thick and syrupy. Gravity loses its bearings and presses at you from all around. Normal reference points fall away— up and down, left and right—your sense of where you are comes only from subtle changes in light, temperature, and pressure. This will take some getting used to. But not to worry, here in the world’s oldest lake, still in its youth at twenty-five million years, you’ve got nothing but time. And if you put on your special magnifying goggles, you’ll see that you’ve got plenty of company, as well. You’re surrounded by a haze of tiny creatures, each no longer than a millimeter and a half. They’re Epischura baicalensis, those elfin shrimp that float through the lake, sucking massive Baikal through their little digestive tracts, feeding on algae and bacteria, pulling out impurities, and helping to keep the lake clean and clear. Epischura baicalensis are members of a group of organisms known as zooplankton—tiny animals and larva that drift and swim through the water, buffeted about by waves and currents. The miniscule creatures that make up zooplankton live everywhere, in just about every body of water on earth, and like Epischura baicalensis, many of them are little shrimp, or copepods. But Epischura baicalensis live nowhere else, and apparently can’t live anywhere else. It’s said that they can’t live even in a glass of Baikal water removed from the lake. Perhaps they die of homesickness. The water surrounding you as you float in Baikal is about as close as you can get in nature to pure H2O. It’s what aquatic scientists call “oligotrophic”— there’s very little in the way of nutrients and minerals running off into it from the surrounding landscape, and so a very limited supply of some of the basic building blocks of life.

This chapter opens with a surprising discovery of a temporary toad habitat, illustrating scientists’ never ceasing wonder of the natural world and the creatures found there. The temporary nature of vernal pools and their critical role in the life cycle of amphibians and reptiles is highlighted throughout the chapter. Vernal pool ecology is described as the pools’ water levels change over the course of the year. How those changes are marked by the animals that depend upon this vanishing ecosystem highlights remarkable evolutionary adaptations. Stories of salamander brigades and turtle hunters illustrate the varied nature of vernal pool ecosystems. Unfortunately, the supposed temporary nature of these wetlands often means they are overlooked and not protected.

This chapter looks at whether the World Trade Organization (WTO) really is a “technocracy” through the lens of “trade-environment” issues, focusing on the Shrimp-Turtle case. It begins with an overview of the democratic deficit critique as it applies to the WTO. It then turns to describing the deliberative features of two of the three principal functions of the WTO-dispute settlement, and what has been called the “missing middle” between the negotiation of treaties and dispute settlement. The fourth section is devoted to an analysis of the Shrimp-Turtle case. The chapter concludes with an assessment of how “technocratic” the WTO really is. It argues that it is not dominated by a “trade elite” to the extent that critics have charged, but the impact of environmental activists does not necessarily make it a more deliberatively democratic institution.

The philosophy of research in the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program expanded what I learned in graduate school from H. T. Odum by providing an approach for a holistic understanding of ecological processes in the tropics. Participation in the LTER program enabled collaborations with many talented people from many parts of the world and enabled the mentoring and education of a new cadre of tropical natural and social sciences students. By expanding the opportunities for research and analysis at larger scales, the LTER program allowed me to address tropical ecosystem responses to such phenomena as hurricanes, floods, landslides, and past land uses and to do so at the appropriate scales of time and space. Paradigms of tropical forest resilience and adaptability in the Anthropocene emerged from research at the Luquillo (LUQ) LTER site. I first became aware of the LTER program in 1978 as I walked by the White House in Washington, DC, with Sandra Brown, then an intern on the President’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), and Wayne Swank, a US Forest Service employee on detail with the National Science Foundation (NSF). I was a staff member at CEQ, and W. Swank explained to us a new long-term ecological research program that he was helping develop at the NSF. Although the first cadre of sites appeared to have been selected, I was immediately captured by the concept and expressed my interest in developing a proposal for a tropical site in Puerto Rico. Little did I know at the time that my whole scientific career was about to change, in part because of the LTER program, but also because I was to become a US Forest Service scientist. The first 30 years of my US Forest Service career would be heavily influenced by the LTER program and the people I worked with while developing a new way of thinking about tropical forest ecosystems. I am an ecologist trained at the Universities of Puerto Rico and North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My experience before becoming part of the LTER program involved (1) teaching at the University of Florida at Gainesville and (2) government work at the Commonwealth (Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources) and federal (President’s Council on Environmental Quality) levels.

This prologue recounts the author's experiences in Bayou Crevette in Louisiana. It details her firsthand experiences with a community and culture that thrives on the local shrimping industry. The economy of Bayou Crevette relies primarily on shrimp fishing, around which the town's other livelihoods and cultural markers revolve—from its abundance of boat-building industries to its seafood festivals as well as to the general sense of pride and self-sufficiency characteristic of its citizens. The gradual erosion of this central factor echoes that of the author's childhood experiences watching her own community deteriorate after the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s. These experiences form the context for the struggles of a local industry already crippled prior to the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

In 1973, George Lindsay, one of Baja California’s most eminent botanists, visited the islands of the Sea of Cortés together with Charles Lindbergh, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Kenneth Bechtel. Lindbergh, one of the most celebrated popular heroes of the twentieth century, had become by that time a committed conservationist, interested in the preservation of whales and in the conservation of nature at large. Joseph Wood Krutch, a naturalist, had written The Forgotten Peninsula, one of the first natural history descriptions of Baja California. George Lindsay had helped organize a series of scientific explorations into the Sea of Cortés and the peninsula of Baja California, first from the San Diego Natural History Museum, and later from the California Academy of Sciences (Banks 1962a,b; Lindsay 1962, 1964, 1966, 1970; Wiggins 1962). Kenneth Bechtel, a philanthropist from San Francisco, had given financial support to the Audubon Society in the 1950s and 1960s to study the sea bird rookery at Isla Rasa, which had been decreed a protected area by the Mexican government in 1962. Bechtel was interested in showing the Sea of Cortés to people who might be aroused by its astounding natural beauty and who might help to protect it. For this purpose, he organized the trip and invited Lindbergh to visit the region. The group flew a chartered Catalina flying-boat that allowed them to get to small and remote islands. They landed in the water and then piloted up to the beach so they could have shade under the wing. They visited many of the islands, starting from Consag north of Bahía de los Ángeles, and ending up in Espíritu Santo, east of the Bay of La Paz. It was a wonderful and memorable trip. Two or three months later, both Lindbergh and Lindsay traveled to Mexico City to watch the Mexican premiere of a documentary film on the Sea of Cortés by the California Academy of Sciences that Kenneth Bechtel had sponsored (see chap. 1). Taking advantage of the opportunity, and also of his immense popularity, Charles Lindbergh requested to see the president of Mexico, Luis Echeverría.

Most (but by no means all) benthic species have larval stages which use the water column for dispersal. As indicated in the previous chapter, a key process affecting recruitment to sediment systems is the need to disperse larvae in order to colonize new areas, even to the extent of releasing larvae at spring tides when the tidal excursion will be greatest, thus effecting an even greater dispersal. Seasonal release of larvae is the norm: most species develop gametes in spring and spawn in late spring or early summer (see Rasmussen 1973 for an excellent data set of the times of planktonic larval occurrence and settlement by many important north-west European boreal benthic species). Some species, however, avoid the high competition for food at this time and release gametes in autumn and winter. Thus larvae of benthic organisms are a key and often dominating component of the spring–summer plankton and play important roles as food for planktonic species such as fish larvae. Conversely, a number of planktonic species have resting stages in sediments. The most important of these are undoubtedly the diatoms and many flagellates, and also certain calanoid copepods such as Acartia, which are of course key components of the phytoplankton and zooplankton respectively. Diatom cysts are often found, and there is increased interest in the survival and hatching processes of dinoflagellate cysts that lead to harmful algal blooms. Similarly, the seasonal occurrence of many zooplankton species results from hatching of resting stages in the sediment (see Smetacek (1995), Boero et al. (1996), Pati et al. (1999) and Boero and Bonsdorff (2008) for reviews). The implication of many important planktonic species having benthic resting phases is that by predating cysts, benthic species may be able to control abundances of planktonic species. In this context the meiofauna are important predators (Pati et al. 1999). It is now important to consider the scales of temporal variation in benthic assemblages. First, seasonal changes occur in benthic assemblages of soft sediments even in the depths of the deep sea (e.g. Hsü and Thiede 1992). In spring, as light levels and temperature increase, a plankton bloom occurs.

This chapter examines an unsuccessful struggle undertaken by Dalit fisherwomen to protect their existing entitlements to traditional fishing work, good health, and decent living standards by stopping the operation of a shrimp farm in their coastal village. It shows how these women’s collective strategies are not only continuously (re)shaped by their encounters with state and non-state actors, but also play out on an unequal political and economic terrain. Their relative lack of power and economic resources obstructs their ability to protect their meagre entitlements when these entitlements conflict with the state’s macro-economic policies. The disjuncture between state laws/policies and state practices, especially corruption, ingrains Dalit women’s exclusion and social inequalities in new ways. Concurrently, multiple interventions by NGO development brokers generate shifting entitlement discourses among the women, with consequences for the meanings women attribute to collective action.

This chapter begins with the concept of the evolution of the eye by natural selection as argued by Charles Darwin and others and goes on to describe vision in various life forms. The chapter describes the environment and ecosystem of the hydrothermal vent where the Rimicaris exoculata lives. This chapter also elaborates on the efforts of Denis Pelli and Steve Chamberlain, who hypothesized that Rimicaris uses its rudimentary eyes to sense thermal vents and that this ability helps it to feed on bacteria. The visual activity of Rimicaris, based on theoretical and biophysical perspectives, black body radiation, and correlations between the emission spectrum of the thermal vent and the absorption spectrum of rhodopsin are discussed in detail.

This chapter describes color vision, color blindness, true color blindness, and the perception of color due to variation in human visual pigment genes. This chapter discusses variation in impressionist painter Claude Monet's perception of color that came with age and the development of cataracts. The differences in gene sequences of visual pigments in different people result in different perceptions when looking at the same color. This difference, in perception of color, is even greater between humans and animals due to a variation of visual pigments. The eye of the mantis shrimp, with its trinocular vision, multitude of visual pigments, light polarization sensitivity, and its intricate movements, make it the animal with the most specialized and sophisticated eyes in the animal kingdom.

World War II fueled technologies for underwater listening, such as hydrophones, and Cold War antisubmarine strategies further rendered the oceans audible, noisy even. This novel ability to hear marine sounds radically transformed not only the discipline of oceanography but also the oceans themselves and the people listening. An examination of U.S. Navy ear-training manuals and sound recordings reveals continuities of testing protocols and ontologies between military oceanographers and marine biologists. Underwater listeners were additionally informed by musical training and technologies such as graphic representation and image processing software. In the oceanic soundscape, marine life was defined relative to Soviet vessels and was approached through an epistemology of error: plankton stood in the way of sound waves, shrimp distorted hydrophone receptions, and whales emitted enigmatically unclassifiable sounds that questioned existing sound signature catalogs. As technologies and data were disclosed to the biologists, this knowledge about error became scientific knowledge.

Few species are exclusively found in mangrove or seagrass habitats; most occur elsewhere and accumulate in mangroves or seagrasses for shelter or food. Mangroves, seagrasses, and other coastal marine habitats such as saltmarsh, coral reefs, and the open sea are linked through the movement of organisms between them, and because of the flow of dissolved and particulate organic matter and inorganic nutrients. Particularly important examples of linkage include the dependence of coastal fisheries, and shrimp aquaculture, on mangroves.

Mangroves and seagrasses supply valuable goods and services, including extraction of timber, food, and medicinal products, support for fisheries and aquaculture, and coastal protection. Mangroves have been valued at US$14 500/ha/year, seagrasses at US$27 000/ha/year. Despite this, both habitats are threatened. Mangrove losses currently run at around 1%/year, mainly through conversion to agriculture or aquaculture ponds, changes in hydrology, or destructive overexploitation. Sustainable management of mangrosve and seagrass resources is, however, possible, the forests of the Matang (Malaysia) being an example. Restoration of mangrove and seagrass habitats is also possible.

This chapter describes the taxonomy of Stomatopoda. Stomatopods, also known as mantis shrimps, because of their resemblance to a praying mantis, are a small order of marine malacostracan crustaceans related to shrimps, crabs, and lobsters. There are around 450 extant stomatopod species in the world and the majority of them live in tropical and sub-tropical regions, although a few species occur in temperate and boreal waters. The chapter covers their life cycle, ecology, and general morphology. It includes a section that indicates the systematic placement of the taxon described within the tree of life, and lists the key marine representative illustrated in the chapter (usually to genus or family level). This section also provides information on the taxonomic authorities responsible for the classification adopted, recent changes which might have occurred, and lists relevant taxonomic sources.

This chapter describes the taxonomy of Lophogastrida and Mysida, small shrimp-like crustaceans commonly known as ‘opossum shrimps’ because of the ventral brood pouch in the female. Because of their highly adaptive nature, they have progressively invaded new areas via new connections of water systems and through ballast water. The chapter covers their life cycle, ecology, and general morphology. It includes a section that indicates the systematic placement of the taxon described within the tree of life, and lists the key marine representative illustrated in the chapter (usually to genus or family level). This section also provides information on the taxonomic authorities responsible for the classification adopted, recent changes which might have occurred, and lists relevant taxonomic sources.