In the Neuse River, a major North Carolina tributary to a larger estuarine system, model estimates indicated about a 12.87% decrease in shrimp harvest relative to a pristine system with no hypoxia. Model estimates for the Pamlico Sound, which does not experience severe hypoxia but is the primary fishing ground for shrimp that use riverine tributaries as nursery habitat, also indicated about a 12.90% decrease in harvest attributable to hypoxia. The decline in harvest due to hypoxia equates to a loss of $32,000 per year in the Neuse River fishery and about $1,240,000 per year in the Pamlico Sound fishery, the difference being due to the much larger size of the Pamlico Sound fishery (i.e., about 50.9% of the 1999–2005 statewide harvest). Our results were robust to different assumptions about the duration of temporal lags between when hypoxia effects occur and when they are expressed in the fishery, as well as several alternative model structures (differenced, nondifferenced, and polynomial distributed lags) with different underlying assumptions. In fact, permutations of the model indicated that harvest losses attributable to hypoxia range from 8% to 35%, suggesting our primary results (12.9%) are conservative.
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