Johnny Marullo’s shrimp trawler is called the Rock Bottom, but he hasn’t hit there yet.

The vessel, named for its concrete hull, zips away from the docks at Pier 19 in Galveston, leaving about a dozen others in its wake.

Unlike the other boat captains, Marullo can afford to trawl the bay this balmy May morning because he’s willing to sacrifice sleep. He works the night shift in the communications tower at the Galveston-Port Bolivar ferry.

Without the second income, Marullo and his brother, who also works a full night shift at the ferry, would have to sell their shrimp licenses back to the government and try to pawn off boats nobody wants.

Shrimp that 20 years ago would earn Marullo $1.25 a pound now bring in less than 40 cents a pound.

Meanwhile, the prices of dock space, $1 million boat insurance policies and diesel fuel have gone up.

Marullo easily burns 50 gallons of diesel a day. At $4 a gallon, that’s $200 just to leave the dock. At the end of the day, he might bring in $200 worth of shrimp, maybe less.

Gulf shrimpers have it just as hard or worse. A 12-day trip offshore, requiring 5,000 gallons of diesel, will cost a boat captain $20,000 before he leaves the dock.

Marullo’s cousin, a Gulf shrimper, hauled in about $30,000 of shrimp on his last two trips. After paying for fuel and deckhands, he was in the hole $500.

Now he’s looking for work on the ferry, too.

At ages 47 and 49, Marullo and his brother are the last of an Italian family’s generations of shrimpers. They refused to let their children carry on the business.

They’ve seen hard times before, but like other shrimpers from here to South Carolina, they think this time the albatross has lingered too long.

An irony grates at the nation’s shrimpers: In American waters, there are plenty of shrimp for the taking.

But with ultracheap shrimp raised in ponds overseas, the rapidly growing American appetite for shrimp is fed increasingly by imports. About 90 percent of the shrimp Americans eat comes from other countries. Historically, about 70 percent of the shrimp was imported. The United States imported $3.9 billion of shrimp in 2007, compared with $1.7 billion in 1989, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Independent shrimpers who operate in the bays have been hit especially hard. Bay production is down to about 5 percent of the state’s shrimp crop — as low as Mike Haby has ever seen it. Historically, the bays produced 30 percent of the yearly harvest, said Haby, a shrimp industry expert at Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi.

“That’s shocking to me,” Haby said. “That just shows that a lot of (bay shrimpers) have just rotated out and are maybe doing other things.”

Making matters worse for many shrimpers is the fact they’ve put off repairs and maintenance, sometimes on the only boat they own.

“Many of those boats have just been foreclosed upon,” Haby said.

While Texas A&M researchers have found new ways to equip boats to make them use as much as 40 percent less fuel, few independent operators can afford to pay $10,000 for the equipment.

“A lot of these guys are literally a major repair away from just being sidelined,” Haby said.

Tom Hults, a local shrimp processor, reported seeing shrimpers leave the docks in boats riddled with holes.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department has spent more than $12 million in the last decade on a program to buy back shrimpers’ licenses. It also stopped issuing new licenses.

The program was supposed to thwart overfishing and ease competition between the remaining shrimpers.

While only a fraction of the remaining licenses are actually in use, working shrimpers say the program has failed to help the industry because the bag limits remain too low.

Bag limits in state waters range from 200 pounds to 600 pounds, depending on the location and whether the shrimp are to be sold as bait. The shrimpers can sell their catch for less than $1 per pound, or about $4 per pound for live bait, which is harder to come by.

Bay shrimpers must increasingly limit themselves to bait shrimping just to do better than break even.

They have focused on bait to such an extent that seafood markets sometimes cannot offer shrimp that has not been frozen, said Nick Gutierrez of Katie’s Seafood Market in Galveston.

Even with a 600-pound bag limit in certain seasons and bays, that doesn’t mean a shrimper will catch 600 pounds in a day. Shrimpers say higher limits are needed to make up for the bad days when they incur losses.

They contend the resource, an annual crop, replenishes itself quickly enough to warrant higher limits.

Haby said even in the heyday of domestic shrimping, there were plenty of shrimp. “And it’s getting better every day,” he said. “There are less people fishing for them.”

But Larry McKinney, director of coastal fisheries for the Parks and Wildlife Department, said regulators have to maintain a delicate balance, especially when it comes to bay shrimp, a fundamental building block of the bay ecosystem. He doesn’t want to see a return to the days when there was “so much shrimping going on we were plowing the bottoms up and destroying the (bottom-dwelling) ecosystems that everything depends upon.”

Regulators show little willingness to ease requirements such as excluder devices — equipment that reduces the amount of marine life besides shrimp that shrimpers catch and kill.

But the state is willing to change the way it imposes bag limits.

There has been much debate about individual transferable quotas — bag limits that apply for a whole season instead of a day and can be traded like commodities.

Under this system, the state estimates the amount of shrimp the bays will produce in a season. It then divides that number, giving each shrimper a quota for the season. Shrimpers can catch shrimp up to their quotas with no limit on daily hauls and no restrictions on when they can trawl. Fuel could be used more efficiently that way, McKinney said.

So far, no one is biting. Shrimpers fear the quotas would enable a few large companies to purchase all of the shares and monopolize the industry. They also say the quotas would be too low, like the current bag limits.

The shrimp that spawn in bays and estuaries eventually become a key food source for redfish, trout and just about anything else that recreational anglers catch. Texas shrimpers say the boon in recreational fishing will make it even harder to get the changes they want from lawmakers and regulators reluctant to stifle the sport.

Pack up the tackle box and float up Galveston Bay on a Saturday, and you can’t spit without hitting another angler. That’s conventional wisdom among recreational anglers, and surveys seem to bear it out.

The number of saltwater anglers in Texas increased by 25 percent in the past five years — faster than in any other state, McKinney said. While other states, including Florida and California, have seen declines, the recreational fishery in Texas is the best it has been in 30 years, carrying an economic impact of $1.7 billion and creating 5,000 new jobs in five years, McKinney said.

Woes in the domestic shrimp industry extend from the boats and down the supply chain.

Hults, third-generation owner of Seabrook Seafood in Kemah, said shrimp processors are hurting, too.

Competing with imports processed by cheap overseas labor, domestic shrimp processors are forced to lower the price they pay shrimpers, and they’re cutting profit margins.

Seabrook Seafood once employed about 80 people. Now it averages about 20. It’s down from six peeling machines to three. Hults said he’s processing about 30 percent less shrimp.

He’s advocating for fewer government restrictions, too.

“Shrimp are about like mosquitoes,” he said. “They multiply like crazy. They spawn numerous times during the year. To think for a moment that it’s possible to go out there and take too much of that — it’s just absurd.”

The economic and political forces steadily pressure shrimpers to draw in their nets and look toward other horizons — often literally. Many are looking not toward land, but farther out toward sea.

“There’s a burgeoning offshore oil economy going on right now,” Haby said. “Every rig needs lots of support from the shore, so there’s work boats to hire out on or to skipper. It’s not like everybody’s going to walk off the shrimp boat and go to the oil patch, but there’s certainly a fraction that have.”

Richard Moore said he, like many others, had no such options. After operating a boat for 45 years, he hung up his nets in 2002. Now he spends his time writing letters to lawmakers, attending meetings and pressuring regulators to ease restrictions on shrimpers. He keeps an office for his advocacy group, Professional Involvement in Seafood Concerned Enterprises, at Hillman’s Seafood Market in Dickinson.

“I have got nothing else to do, and it’s such an injustice, what they’ve done,” he said. “They’ve raped this industry.”

At Hillman’s, Joanne Morris peers out a window and points at a dozen shrimp trawlers docked outside. She used to shrimp with her father, Theodore “B.B.” Hillman, the namesake for one of the vessels at the dock.

The boats’ 30-foot arms jut toward the sky, supporting bunched-up nets that writhe in the wind, as if protesting that they have given up everything that anyone could possibly wring out of them.

On the dock, shrimper Dub Hansley strokes his wiry, peppered beard and puffs thoughtfully on a cigarette.

“I never had to work a day in my life,” he says. “I either went shrimping, or I was getting ready to go shrimping.”

He enjoys it because it’s competitive, and he likes to be on the water early in the morning for the sunrises — “some of the most beautiful, and the most ugly.”

Hansley and Joanne Morris’ husband, Mike, tick off names like a roll call of war dead. They’re the casualties of the industry, those who, unlike Johnny Marullo, truly have hit rock bottom.

Tethered to the docks, their boats rest in rows like gravestones.

Hansley says every one is up for sale.