This award completed involvement of the Gulf and South Atlantic Fisheries Development Foundation, Inc. in a multi-organizational multi-year research program to address bycatch in the shrimp fishery of the southeastern U.S.  Primarily, this award supported continued at-sea data collection by observers and Foundation efforts to disseminate information about bycatch and its reduction to interested and affected parties.   During this award, observers logged 589 sea-days on 36 sampling trips in southeast U.S. waters aboard 10 different participating commercial shrimp trawlers. The catch in 671 paired tows was evaluated for the exclusion capability of various experimental devices, or the exclusion of various TEDs; additionally a minimal 3 tows were sampled characterizing the catch of the South Atlantic rock shrimp fishery. This effort contributed to a 1993-1996 Foundation-generated database of 3,166 tows (55% of the programmatic database).   Since the Bycatch Program began, a wide variety of types and configurations of bycatch-reduction devices (BRDs) have been tested by this organization, and others.   Previous research has documented that two general categories of BRDs (fisheyes and expanded mesh) can be used to excluded substantial numbers and weight of finfish without concurrent substantial shrimp loss.