Been in Texas a long time and spent years fishing/canoeing lots of the rivers. Used to spend a lot of time on the San Marcos and it's the only river I have heard of that has a good population. From all I have learned about them they really come and go in cycles. Plentiful one year and rare the next. Can find them all the way up to the headwaters(Aquarina Springs). Lots of snorkling on the river in town and people see them ocassionaly. Heard they may spawn in the brackish bays. San Marcos has no big reservoirs but plenty little "low head" dams that I would think would make that difficult to believe. Yea, they can get BIG.

I fish lake corpus Christi all the time and have caught a few while fishing for catfish. A old timer told me that he use to trap them. Have a picture on my cell but don't know how to download it.

We used to seine up a smaller variety of machrobranchium on the Little Brazos in the 70's.....can't remember which one right now . Anyway, also mullet as I recall...maybe white mullet.

Lake corpus christi definately has them in there. i grew up fishing that lake as well and have caught a few here and there.

High. I just joined. When I was studying for my biology degree in the 70s, we had in the lab a gallon jar of formaldehyde. It contained a male machrobracium shrimp measuring 23.5 inches from telson to the ends of the chelae. Years later, it was last summer that I was fishing in the nueces river below the dam. I wasn't catching much but there was an old rusty pipe just under the surface of the water. When my bait dangled close to the end of it, a big shrimp stuck oui his chelae and grabbed my shrimp. We played tug of war for a while, they have a pretty good grip. How the shrimp could breed above the dam when they need brackish water is this. Our lakes and rivers become quite brackish during drought.

When I was younger we caught some in perch traps straight across from the State park. If I remember correctly there is some sort of pump building/station in that area. It was a rocky shoreline.

Thanks again for the input, everyone. I'll be based at Corpus Christi from the 19th to the 23rd.

pmeheran, that sounds like a very plausible scenario. I'll definitely be taking salinity and tds measurements.


I'm guessing those were M. ohione, the "Ohio River shrimp," which occurs from the Ohio River (naturally) to northeastern Mexico.

Look delicious.