Coastal Georgia shrimpers turn to jellyfish to make money

The catch, about a ton of it, splats onto the deck of the shrimper Miss Bertha. Thousands of softball-sized globes glisten in the sun, then slide down a tray into the boat’s belly.
Welcome to Georgia’s third-largest commercial fishery by weight: cannonball jellyfish.
The stingless jellies, scientifically Stomolophus meleagris, are keeping shrimpers who once shunned them financially afloat.
Howell Boone, 53, is one of them. He bought this 80-foot boat specifically for jellyballing after Georgia’s shrimp fishery got squeezed by high fuel prices and cheap imported shrimp. The Darien resident now hauls in as many jellyfish as the only processor can handle — 60,000 pounds at a time.
On a recent Tuesday, with 3-foot seas rocking the boat off Sapelo Island and the tide coming in, the first haul proved less than ideal. Because the going price is 6 cents a pound, Boone relies on high volume to make each jellyballing trip a money maker. He won’t go home until the hold overflows.
“We can get by with it,” Boone said of the first drag. “But we need a fatter bag.”
So the nets are lowered and the Miss Bertha and her crew of four keeps searching for jellies.
In Georgia, jellyfish are an experimental fishery that’s been permitted since 1998, said Jim Page, a marine biologist with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.
Fishermen must use a device that keeps sea turtles out of the nets when they’re fishing in state waters, which extend three miles out from the beach. In federal waters from three to 200 miles offshore, jellyfish aren’t recognized as a fishery, making it more of a free-for-all.
Consequently, Boone and other jellyball fishermen — there are five boats
in the fishery — prefer to go out past state waters.
It’s not that Boone’s not concerned about turtles. In fact, he’s just returned from a trip to California to accept the Sea Turtle Champion Award from the International Sea Turtle Society on behalf of his late father, Sinkey Boone.
The honor stemmed from the elder Boone’s work on the turtle excluder device that’s credited with preventing thousands of turtles from drowning in shrimp nets. Howell Boone has modified the design recently to make sure larger leatherback sea turtles can escape the nets, too.
But turtle excluders also exclude jellyfish, Boone said. He should know, since it was jellyfish Sinkey was initially trying to exclude. Frustrated by how jellyballs clogged up his nets, he sewed into his gear a circular grate — picture a barbecue grill — that let shrimp through but deflected the jellyfish, sending them out an escape hatch. Some still call it a jellyball shooter.
Besides, when Boone catches jellyfish, few other creatures end up in the net. That’s because it’s pulled slowly through the middle or upper part of the water column, he said. Fast-swimming creatures can avoid it and bottom dwellers are untouched. And the drags are relatively short at about 20 minutes.
If Boone does accidentally catch a sea turtle it will probably not drown in that time and he can throw it back overboard unharmed. Only one drag on a recent Tuesday pulled up much bycatch — about a dozen sting rays, which the crew gaffed and threw back. When the nets pulled up two black-tipped sharks, Boone promptly filleted them and threw them in the fridge.
The DNR’s Page confirmed that jellyball fishing seems relatively free of bycatch, a perennial concern for fishery managers.

Tastes like jellyfish
The jellyfish catch is readied for export at Golden Island International in Darien. The process is like pickling, said owner Terry Chuang, who’s originally from Taiwan. Workers remove the stem from the bulbous body of the jellyfish. Then they salt it and allow it to dry. Along the way, the jelly loses about 80 percent to 90 percent of its weight.
“Our yield is 10-15 percent,” he said. “That’s good for shipping and they can last many years.”
Chuang ships out of the port of Savannah to China and Japan, where jellyfish are used in salads and stir fries. They’re “very healthy, full of collagen,” Chuang said.
While catching the jellyfish has raised few environmental concerns, questions arose about the processing last week after Golden Island International discharged jellyfish and dead fin fish into the Darien River.
“Darien has not smelled nice for quite a few days,” said Altamaha Riverkeeper Executive Director Deborah Sheppard. She alerted the Environmental Protection Division of DNR and is looking for environmentally friendly ways, perhaps composting, for Chuang to dispose of excess catch.
“I hope this results in (the riverkeeper) and EPD working with the company to find constructive solutions for the waste that comes from this industry,” Sheppard said.
Chuang said he didn’t know he couldn’t dump bycatch and undersized jellyballs into the river, but won’t do it if it’s against regulations. Howell said nature puts plenty of dead jellies in the river because they swim upriver to spawn and then die.
“I know what he’s doing and it won’t do any damage,” Howell said. “They’re 90 percent water. They’ll disappear.”
Chuang thinks he may be the only U.S. exporter of jellyfish after a Gulf of Mexico exporter shut down. Fishery managers in Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina said they knww of no jellyball fisheries in their states.
“Our jellyfish is called cannonball,” Chuang said. “This is not the best one in world but a pretty good one. In China, the market is huge, but the price is low. In Japan, the new generation doesn’t eat it. I still export (there), but the quantity has dropped.”
Page said he’d tasted jellyfish but didn’t go back for seconds.
“If it was up to me, it would be a tough sell,” he said. “But they’ve found a market overseas that certainly thinks it’s a delicacy.”
Home before sunrise
Nor is Howell a fan of jellyfish flavor. He is a fan of profit though, so his jellyballing trip that began at 1 p.m. lasted into the next day.
On the fifth drag, still well before dark, the net bulged.
“That’s a lot of jelly,” Howell said. “That’s what we want to see.”
The work is easier than shrimping, the men agree. Boone typically pops the heads off his shrimp and ices the catch, adding two tedious steps missing from the jellyballing. Boone and worker Randy Tucker remember one massive haul on the first day of shrimp season that had them poised on tiny stools and working furiously.
“It took three days to get over it, I was so bent up,” Boone said.
Boone scans the water’s surface for jellyfish as the Miss Bertha trawls the choppy waters. Sometimes the jellies look thick enough to walk across, he said. But not this day. It takes more than a dozen trawls and an equal number of hours to reach the goal of 60,000 pounds.
After the jellies are stored, Boone’s nephew, Michael Boone, 22, captains the Miss Bertha back up the Darien River, steering the familiar route with his feet, one eye constantly on the depth finder. He’ll head out again as soon as Chuang’s processors can handle another load.
“If they’d let us, we’d go out every day,” said Michael Boone. “I wish they would.”
Source http://savannahnow.com/