‘No cigarettes, no vodka, no Internet’

Aral Sea fishermen earn good money harvesting brine shrimp eggs in the harshest conditions. But how long can it last?

Earlier this year, journalist and researcher Emilia Sulek teamed up with photographer Danil Usmanov to document the lives of brine shrimp fishermen working in the disappearing Aral Sea in Karakalpakstan, an autonomous region in northwestern Uzbekistan. Also known as Artemia or “sea monkeys,” brine shrimp are one of the few species that can survive in the Aral Sea’s extremely salty waters. And their minuscule pink eggs play a key role in the global aquaculture industry. Harvesting these cysts, as the eggs are known, is no small feat. But the fishermen who brave the Aral Sea’s harsh climate stand to make good money — at least for the time being.

The following story appeared in The Beet, a weekly email dispatch from Meduza covering Central and Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. A version of this story was first published in the Swiss newspaper Die Wochenzeitung (WOZ) thanks to funding from the ProWOZ research fund.

The water temperature is minus three degrees Celsius (27 Fahrenheit). The dinghy sways on the rough waves. The engine stutters. If it cuts out now, there’s no chance of making it back to shore.

Ablatdin Musaev, a biologist at the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, “goes to sea” several times a year. “Nobody else is this crazy,” he says. There’s not a single other boat visible along the shoreline. There’s also no cell phone reception should he need help.

Out on the water, Musaev opens his equipment case. He pulls out a salinometer and some plankton nets, and uses a Secchi disk to measure the water transparency. “The cloudier it is, the more zooplankton there is in it,” he explains enthusiastically.

Musaev works in Nukus, the capital of Karakalpakstan. This autonomous republic in Uzbekistan’s west makes up more than a third of the country’s total land area. Nukus used to be 160 kilometers (100 miles) from the shores of the Aral Sea, but today it’s a lot further away. Even from the former port of Moynaq, all you can see is desert.

The Aral Sea was once the world’s fourth-largest body of inland water. The endorheic lake, which straddled the borders of the Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, fed millions of people. At its peak, the annual fish catch was some 50,000 tons. Creatives wrote poems about the Aral Sea and painted landscapes with fishermen pulling bulging nets from the water.

But then, in the 1960s, the Soviet authorities decided to drastically expand cotton production in this part of the empire. Central Asia may well consist largely of desert, but the government was thinking big. The Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, which fed the Aral Sea, were rerouted to irrigate the cotton fields, reducing inflow. The Aral Sea’s water level soon began dropping up to a meter (three feet) per year. But the Kremlin ignored alarming reports coming from the region, as they didn’t fit the state’s ideological narrative of man triumphing over nature.

As the Aral Sea disappeared, jobs did too. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, the once thriving Republic of Karakalpakstan became impoverished. Most Russians emigrated to Russia, and many Kazakhs to neighboring Kazakhstan. But the Karakalpaks stayed. Although their national identity was recognized in the early Soviet era, they have never had a state of their own. According to various estimates, there are between 708,800 and 1.2 million Karakalpaks in Uzbekistan today.

‘A lucrative business’

Where waves once crashed against the shore, the world’s newest desert, the Aralkum, now stretches as far as the eye can see. At 68,000 square kilometers (26,000 square miles), the Aral Sea was once larger than the state of West Virginia. Now, it’s about a tenth of that size. The North Aral Sea, the northern part of the original basin, lies in Kazakhstan. Further south, in Uzbekistan, several lakes have formed; the largest one is the South Aral Sea.

Over time, as less water reached the basin, the lake became progressively saltier. An increasing number of fish died off. Other species were introduced in their place, but the water was too salty even for them. First the Baltic herring, then the sand smelt, and finally the flounder all disappeared.

Brine shrimp colonized what was left of the Aral Sea in the late 1990s, having apparently arrived in bird droppings. (The Aral Sea is on a flamingo migration route.) These crustaceans are only about a centimeter long (not even half an inch), but can survive in an environment saltier than the ocean. Given the right conditions, they reproduce asexually. It’s almost a single-sex species; males are very rare.

When there’s too little oxygen in the water or the temperature drops below seven degrees Celsius (45 Fahrenheit), brine shrimp deposit eggs, known as cysts, in the water. The following spring, these cysts awaken from their dormancy and hatch.

Until the mid-20th century, brine shrimp were mainly known among amateur fish farmers. That changed when a boom in aquaculture created a new market. When dried properly, brine shrimp cysts never spoil. Place them in warm, salty water, and the larvae hatch within a day. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, this easily digestible source of protein now feeds ten million tons of farmed fish and crustaceans worldwide. The global brine shrimp market is valued at an estimated $144 million. Annual growth rates of nine percent are expected by the end of the decade.

Musaev owes his interest in brine shrimp to his participation in NATO’s Science for Peace and Security Program, which aimed to strengthen cooperation with the Central Asian region. “That’s when I realized Karakalpakstan had an opportunity,” he says.

Today, the 48-year-old Karakalpakstan native spends a lot of his time hovering over a microscope. He’s responsible for preparing reports on how many brine shrimp cysts can be removed from the lake without harming the environment. This number increases with each passing year. In 2010, he says, nine tons were harvested. By 2018, it was 2,000 tons. For the current season, Musaev recommends extracting a maximum of 3,500 tons, about sixty percent of the total population. Chinese companies have long since established themselves in the region — and China accounts for about half of brine shrimp consumption.

Musaev’s position is chronically underfunded. He got the rubber dinghy from NATO but pays for the research trips himself. But he says the most difficult thing is the responsibility. “In April, I have to say how many cysts can be caught over the following year. If something goes wrong, it’s my fault,” he confesses over a glass of Qarataw, a famous Karakalpak vodka. “Brine shrimp are a lucrative business. The authorities are breathing down everyone’s necks.”

In 2016, Musaev was accused of poaching. The season was mediocre, even though there was a lot of the zooplankton in the water, on which brine shrimp feed. “We started catching cysts in the spring and wanted to bring them back to the lake at a later date to stimulate reproduction,” he explains. Someone reported the biologist to the police. After an 18-month-long investigation, the court acquitted Musaev on appeal. He’s been cautious ever since.

The beach

Military tents are scattered along a shoreline covered in frozen sand, snow, and salt. The tents are covered with truck tarps and reinforced with sandbags. Half of them have metal frames peeking out from under torn material. “We have real hurricanes here,” says Talgat Dzhubandikov. The winds reach speeds of over 120 kilometers (75 miles) per hour.

Dzhubandikov is spending his fourth winter on this beach; he refers to this place as “Siberia.” But the icy wind from Russia destroying his belongings isn’t his main concern. The bigger problem is that the wind carries the brine shrimp cysts further out into the lake. Catching them on the lake’s east side isn’t an option: the mud there stretches out for miles and the water is so salty it almost never freezes.

Dzhubandikov started helping his father fish when he was in grade school. Now, the 35-year-old Kazakh will accept virtually any job. In the summer, he works on construction sites or harvesting hay. He has collected scrap metal and tried his hand at poaching. His pregnant wife and three children are waiting for him back home, but he spends six months of the year “at sea.”

Dzhubandikov’s team is made up of men from the ethnic Kazakh village of Uchsay. Kazakhs make up about 15 percent of the population in Karakalpakstan. Kazakh and Karakalpak are both Turkic languages, so similar that some people speak a casual mix of both. Though it’s part of Uzbekistan, Karakalpakstan is culturally closer to Kazakhstan.

Every member of Dzhubandikov’s team has equal rights and works on their own behalf. You don’t need much to harvest brine shrimp: just a tent, some motorcycles, simple tools, gas, drinking water, and food. Dzhubandikov buys everything except the gas on credit, which he pays off at the end of the season.

It’s February and Dzhubandikov’s team is still at the lake, even though they haven’t been able to catch anything for weeks. The days all follow the same pattern: sleeping, eating, playing cards. They have to keep the equipment in working order, repair damage to their tents, and keep an eye on the shore.

The fishermen wade through icy waves. Their clothes are stiff with salt, their hands numb from the cold. A cyst is only a quarter of a millimeter (one-hundredth of an inch) in size. In large quantities, they form what looks like pink sand. The fishermen collect the cysts with shovels or harvest them directly from the water.

Fishing from a boat is prohibited, but there are no boats left in the area anyway. The ship cemetery in Moynaq, the town’s main tourist attraction, is home to a handful of rusty cutters. All the others have been disassembled for scrap.

More photos from Moynaq

‘Their own kind of order’

Under Uzbekistan’s first President Islam Karimov, the government paid little attention to Karakalpakstan’s economic development. Mitigating the effects of the environmental disaster in the shrinking Aral Sea was left up to international organizations.

Uzbekistan undertook a development program for Karakalpakstan after President Shavkat Mirziyoyev came to power in 2016. The streets of Moynaq were repaved and old fishing houses were replaced with new buildings. Today, there are plans to expand tourism.

According to the United Nations, almost 30 percent of Karakalpakstan’s population lives below the poverty line. People wait in lines at ATMs for their salaries to come through. The average monthly salary in the region is 4 million soms, or $316. Most cars run on natural gas, which is produced locally but dispensed according to a rotating schedule. (In other words, drivers can only fuel up on their designated days.)

The region’s biggest problem, however, is the lack of water — and the overabundance of salt. Up to 70 percent of the Aralkum Desert is made up of salty sand. In addition to sodium chloride, it contains other chemical compounds that once flowed into the sea from Uzbekistan’s heavily fertilized fields. The wind carries salty dust, and the salt leaches into the groundwater, too.

Nursultan Koshbanov sleeps with a backpack under his head in a mud hut on the lakeshore. His friends are lounging around a kettle, wearing long underwear and military jackets. They haven’t smoked in a month. “It’s too far to go to the store. This is our detox — no cigarettes, no vodka, no Internet.”

Koshbanov is new, and he’s had a bad season. He has only collected nine bags of cysts since September, whereas, in theory, a good day can yield as many as 20. The collection point pays about $70 for a thirty-kilogram (66-pound) bag of wet cysts. Every fruitless day costs money, and 32-year-old Koshbanov has a team of 13 with him. As their employer, he sets the team up with equipment and has paid for food, fuel, and even rubber boots out of his own pocket. He was banking on big profits. So far, he’s lost almost $3,400.

The collection point, also located on the lakeshore, is made up of some warehouses, a security team, and an office, all nestled behind a barbed-wire fence. Each tent has a number, and each of the several hundred fishermen has a license and a booklet where he logs his catch. The government recently decided to bring some order to the brine shrimp market — “their own kind of order,” Koshbanov emphasizes. State-owned Aral Artemia Prom gained exclusive rights to buying cysts from the fishermen in 2020, forcing out more than twenty private companies from the market. The fishermen had a choice: work for the state or not at all.

Uzbekistan’s Antimonopoly Committee reacted quickly. The government had violated the law on free competition, it said in a statement. The Committee called for equal conditions for all economic stakeholders and support for those already working in the industry. President Mirziyoyev has long touted plans for privatization, including in the cotton industry, where Uzbekistan is one of the world’s top exporters. Yet state control over the brine shrimp trade is a step in the opposite direction.

Koshbanov equates the monopoly with a total lack of control for those lower down the food chain. “The state has us under a magnifying glass, but all the real money is made at the top,” he says. Rumors of fraud at the state level swirl on the lakeshore. Allegedly, Kazakh brine shrimp is reaching China via Uzbekistan. On paper, the goods are initially listed as cheap manufacturing waste; once in Uzbekistan, however, they’re re-declared and then transported across the border — and civil servants pocket the price difference.

Koshbanov once leased a small lake and employed fishermen. But with the fish population decreasing year after year, he and his team ultimately came here instead. “Ideally our guys would be able to work their way up in the business. Instead, they’ve been freezing their hands off fishing for years,” he says.

‘The lake won’t come back’

Musaev tests the quality of the goods in his office, which is filled with bags of brine shrimp eggs. “Our cysts aren’t the best,” he freely admits. The most popular are Artemia franciscana from the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The U.S. remains the global leader in terms of production, followed by China, Russia, Kazakhstan, and then Uzbekistan.

However, it’s not the quality but the quantity that worries Musaev. The hotter it gets, the faster the South Aral Sea evaporates. Current salinity is 200 grams (7.05 ounces) per liter, which is almost six times higher than in the ocean. “At 250 grams [per liter], even brine shrimp give up the ghost,” says Musaev. “I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, but we only have five years left.”

Musaev sees opportunities in breeding: although 90 percent of cysts come from natural sources, aquaculture is showing promising results, too. The biggest success story is Vietnam, where brine shrimp farming was introduced on salt farms in the Mekong Delta. Cysts from Vietnam can fetch up to $200 per kilo. “That could work here too,” Musaev says.

In 2022, the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ) helped launch a pilot project for cultivating brine shrimp, in which Musaev is still involved. “We need good processing equipment, otherwise we can only sell the raw product,” he says. A kilo of dry cysts costs $25, but once processed, it goes for more than twice that amount. Musaev is cautious as he looks to the future. He doesn’t believe the industry has any hope of becoming sustainable without a sound investment strategy from the state and private sector.

* * *

Talgat Dzhubandikov makes his way back to his village. There’s no road, so he drives by instinct, using the gas flares from processing plants as landmarks. Natural gas is Karakalpakstan’s main source of income. “That’s one of the reasons why the lake won’t come back,” he says. “The extraction companies will never let water flow back into the Aral again.”

After six months at the lake, life back home catches up with Dzhubandikov. His daughter has broken her arm, and his wife is due to give birth this month. When asked about her husband, she shrugs: her father and grandfather were fishermen too, so they were never around either.

Dzhubandikov plays with the car keys in his hands. He bought a second-hand Chevrolet with the money he made last year and started working as a taxi driver. This year, his first priority is to pay off his debts.

Hello, I’m Eilish Hart, the editor of The Beet. Thanks for taking the time to read our work! Our newsletter delivers underreported stories like this one to subscribers every Thursday. Like all of Meduza’s reporting, it’s free to read, but relies on support from readers like you. Please consider donating to our crowdfunding campaign.

Story by Emilia Sulek

Translated by Desmond Tumulty for The Beet