A commercial swordfish longliner prepares to depart San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a week-long Caribbean fishing trip.

An Islamorada, Florida, charter boat loaded with electronics also sports a flying bridge for spotting billfish.

A South Carolina shark longliner prepares to unload the day's catch at his Folly Beach, South Carolina, dock.

A 15-foot fiberglass white shark attracts customers to an Islamorada, Florida, charter boat operation.

Menhaden plants, like this one in Moss Point, Mississippi, have long provided good jobs in coastal towns.

A crew member divides the day's yellowtail snapper catch taken on an Islamorada, Florida, charter boat.

Colorful dories line the beach at Crashboat, Puerto Rico, after a day of pursuing snapper, mackerel, and dolphin fish.

Local inhabitants of Rincon, Puerto Rico, admire a good catch of red snapper.

Small snapper, grouper, and parrotfish are sold from the back of a truck in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.

Filleted grouper carcasses after a days's head boat fishing out of Tarpon Springs, Florida.

Fishermen in Louisiana's flood prone Grand Isle solve their housing problems with stilt-mounted trailers

A few trawlers deliver croaker and other groundfish to a Pascagoula, Mississippi, pet food cannery.

A resident of Tybee Island, Georgia, targets the small but fine-tasting spot, ubiquitous along Atlantic shores.

A red drum angler working the shallows off Padre Island, Texas.

This fisherman in Aransas Pass, Texas, like many anglers, is adept at cast-netting for bait fish.

A small Texas shrimp boat heads out of Corpus Christi for day-long fishing trip in the productive Laguna Madre.

This gourmet market in metropolitan Washington, D.C., offers up a mouth-watering platter of shrimp.

Mississippi shrimp boats, like these in Biloxi, are often identical to those of Louisiana and Texas.

Small wingnetters, like this one in Louisiana's Bayou La Fourche, take a surprising amount of the smaller-sized shrimp.

June Krantz, a successful lobster trapper in Casco Bay, Maine, is one of thousands of women participating in commercial American fisheries.

This shrimp net has both a mesh-panel, bycatch-reduction device (BRD) and grill-type, turtle-excluder device (TED).

Fishermen, scientists, and shrimp farmers sign up for a Corpus Christi, Texas, workshop on shrimp aquaculture.

Florida Bay looks serene but is vulnerable to pesticide contamination from runoff.

Repaired iron-and-wood frames of submerged pound-type pens await return to specially licensed areas off Pt. Judith, Rhode Island.

Maine's lobster industry depends on hundreds of thousands of these plastic-coated galvanized wire traps, which are set everywhere along the coast.

Lobster claws are banded to protect handlers - and fellow lobsters - at this market in Jessup, Maryland.

Pt. Judith's small lobster boats set pots in Long Island Sound, while the while the larger Rhode Island boats fish offshore.

A Pt. Judith, Rhode Island, bait seller strings skates for sale to local lobstermen.

Demand for Florida Keys spiny lobster is heavy at dockside restaurants, like this one in Islamorada.

This thirty-foot lobster sculpture in Plantation Key, Florida, is guaranteed to stop traffic and sharpen appetites.

Wood-and-wire lobster pots, seen here on a dock at Puerto Rico's Fajardo Beach, are still common in the Caribbean.

The nation's capital attracts swarms of crab-lovers to its riverfront market steamers on warm summer evenings.

A well-gloved worker in a Washington, D.C., seafood market demonstrates blue crabs' tenacious grip.

Few seafoods have the ‚clat of Florida's stone crab, with entire restaurants devoted to this one product.

Locally caught scallops are a specialty of coastal restaurants, like this one in Pt. Pleasant, New Jersey.

Workers sort scallops by size at a waterside processing plant in Seaford, Virginia.

Seaford, Virginia, is home to a large and modern fleet of scallop dredgers.

Freeport, Long Island, clam boats share dock space with vessels fishing squid, flounder, and other coastal species.

At a Kent Narrows, Maryland, processing plant, a worker ices down steamer clams to keep them alive until cooking.

Littleneck clams grown out in marshside pens are rinsed at a clam farm in Folly Beach, South Carolina.

Piles of shells are destined as habitat in the next generation of larval oysters in St. Michaels, Maryland.

Tons of bagged blue point oysters are trucked to market from shoreside beds near Norwalk, Connecticut.

This small Norwalk, Connecticut, boat serves beds of the privately owned blue point oysters.

A Florida Keys shop boast queen conch shells, but the species is badly overfished in both Florida and the Caribbean.

The homely but tastey whelk needs healthy marshes for its survival like this one in North Carolina's Albemarle Sound.

Fishermen from Pt. Pleasant, New Jersey, now target squid and other resources because of groundfish declines.

Urchin boats, like this one in Portland, Maine, are usually quite small and crewed by just two people.

Many people consider the rough spicules and uneven contours of natural sponge superior to the synthetic product.

One of Florida's remaining sponge boats returns to Tarpon Springs with the animals drying on a tarp-covered frame.

Maine fishermen are investing in algal cultivation to meet the heavy demand for these processed sheets of nori.