50 Fun Facts About Shrimp

Shrimp usually swim forward by paddling their swimmerets, but how do they escape danger?

The 'caridoid escape reaction' is nicknamed lobstering. Some species dive straight into the sediment afterwards to hide.

Shrimp are decapods. How many walking legs does that order's name promise?

In the common shrimp the first two pairs carry small claws for grabbing food, and the last four pairs are thin legs used mostly for perching. Crabs and lobsters share the ten-legged plan but walk instead of swim.

How long do shrimp usually live?

They are mostly solitary but can gather in huge schools to spawn. Everything from fish to whales eats them.

Which of these is true of the words 'shrimp' and 'prawn'?

Usage flips between countries: big commercial species tend to be called shrimp in the US and prawns in the Commonwealth. Taxonomist Tin-Yam Chan says the terms 'have no definite reference to any known taxonomic groups'.

The word 'shrimp' comes from Middle English and Low German roots meaning what?

Related Old Norse words meant 'to shrivel up' and 'a thin person'. That is why calling someone a shrimp is not a compliment.

Which naturalist described the common shrimp, Crangon crangon, in 1758?

The much larger common prawn was described by Pennant in 1777. The two European species shaped the whole idea that shrimp are small and prawns are big.

Which of these does a shrimp use to 'smell' or 'taste' chemicals in the water?

One pair of antennae can be twice the animal's body length. The rostrum is the beak-like spike on the head, used for defence and stability.

The oldest known shrimp fossils date from which period?

Only 57 exclusively fossil shrimp species are known, because their thin shells rarely preserve. Mantis shrimp, a separate group, go back much further.

Roughly how much is the global commercial shrimp industry worth per year?

Total production was nearly 7 million tonnes in 2010. Bycatch from wild trawling and pollution from farms are the industry's two big environmental problems.

In roughly which year did the harvest from shrimp farms first exceed the wild catch?

Farming took off in the 1980s, particularly in China. About three-quarters of farmed shrimp still comes from Asia.

By 2016, which country was the world's largest shrimp exporter?

Ecuador was second, and has since become a giant of whiteleg shrimp farming. Most of the product goes to the US, EU and Japan.

Which species overtook the giant tiger prawn around 2010 to dominate world shrimp farming?

Its output rocketed nearly twenty-fold in a decade to 2.7 million tonnes. It breeds well in captivity, grows fast and tolerates crowded ponds.

Females of the giant tiger prawn, Penaeus monodon, can reach about what length?

That is why the phrase 'jumbo shrimp' only sounds like an oxymoron. The species has also turned up as an invader in the Gulf of Mexico since 1988.

Trawling was first recorded in England in 1376, when which king was petitioned to ban it?

The Dutch banned shrimp trawling in estuaries in 1583. Modern shrimping only took off with the otter trawl and the internal combustion engine.

Beach seines imported from France in 1735 let fishermen in which US state start sun-drying white shrimp?

Cajun fishermen still dry shrimp in the sun today. Chinese immigrants later brought Pearl River Delta netting techniques to California during the Gold Rush.

Mantis shrimp eyes have how many types of photoreceptor cell, compared with four in humans?

They see from deep ultraviolet to far red and can detect polarised light. Six species can even see circularly polarised light, unknown in any other animal.

The peacock mantis shrimp strikes with an acceleration of about 10,400 g and a speed of roughly what?

The club moves so fast it creates cavitation bubbles that hit the prey a second time as they collapse. Aquarium keepers call the animals 'thumb splitters'.

Mantis shrimp are usually sorted into which two groups by the shape of their raptorial claws?

Smashers crack open crabs and snails with a club; spearers impale soft prey like fish with barbed spines. Some monogamous species stay with one partner for up to 20 years.

Ancient Assyrians had a name for mantis shrimp. What did they call them?

Australians called them prawn killers. Despite the name they are stomatopods, not true shrimp, and split off from other crustaceans about 400 million years ago.

The pistol shrimp's claw snap creates a bubble reaching a peak of about how many decibels?

The bubble flies out at 25 m/s and can stun fish and crack small glass jars. Colonies are loud enough to interfere with sonar and anti-submarine warfare.

Besides noise, what does the collapsing bubble from a pistol shrimp's snap briefly produce?

The effect is called sonoluminescence, and this was the first known animal to produce light that way. It is too faint for the naked eye.

Some snapping shrimp share a burrow with which fish, which acts as a lookout while the shrimp digs?

The nearly blind shrimp keeps an antenna touching the fish; a flick of the fish's tail sends both diving for cover. It is a textbook mutualism.

Cleaner shrimp earn their name by picking what off 'client' fish?

They also eat mucus and dead tissue around wounds, which helps the fish heal. Client fish queue at cleaning stations and open their mouths and gills for service.

Most of the world's dried brine shrimp cysts, used as fish-farm feed, are harvested from which body of water?

The eggs can sit dormant for years and hatch on demand. Brine shrimp survive salinity up to 25 percent, which keeps fish predators away.

Brine shrimp are sold as a novelty pet under what famous brand name?

Harold von Braunhut launched them as 'Instant Life' in 1957 and renamed them in 1962. He bought millions of pages of comic-book ads a year.

Which astronaut took a batch of the novelty brine-shrimp pets into orbit on Discovery in 1998?

They spent nine days in space, came home and hatched eight weeks later, apparently none the worse. Glenn was 77 at the time, the oldest person to fly in space until 2021.

Under what name were the novelty brine-shrimp pets first sold in 1957, before their famous 1962 rebrand?

They sold for 49 cents. Marine biologist Anthony D'Agostino helped work out the dry nutrient mix that made tap water habitable for the shrimp.

Krill, the shrimp-like crustaceans that feed baleen whales, belong to which order?

Antarctic krill alone weigh in at roughly 379 million tonnes, one of the largest biomasses of any species. Over half of it is eaten every year.

Skeleton shrimp, despite the name, are actually what kind of crustacean?

Their stick-thin bodies cling to seaweed and hydroids. In some species the female kills the male after mating with venom from a claw.

The emperor shrimp of the Indo-Pacific spends its life riding on the back of which animal?

It even changes colour to match its host. The tiny 3 cm shrimp gets transport and protection while picking food from the water.

The aquarium 'cherry shrimp', a red form of Neocaridina davidi, is native to which region?

Wild ones are greenish-brown; hobbyists have bred them into reds, blues, yellows and blacks. Most of the world's population now lives in fish tanks.

The algae-eating shrimp Caridina multidentata is nicknamed after which Japanese aquascaper?

Like all crustaceans they have copper-based haemocyanin blood, which makes them extremely sensitive to copper in tap water and medicines.

The northern prawn, Pandalus borealis, starts life as one sex and switches to the other. Which way round?

They are protandrous hermaphrodites living in water of 0-8 °C at depths down to 1,330 metres. Females grow larger, up to 16.5 cm.

The 'vein' removed when deveining a shrimp is actually what?

It is neither poisonous nor especially tasty; removal is cosmetic and slightly evens out the flavour. On big prawns the 'blood vein' along the belly is really the nerve cord.

In the United States, classic cocktail sauce for shrimp is essentially ketchup mixed with what?

In Commonwealth countries it is ketchup and mayonnaise, the Marie Rose sauce. The dish was the most popular starter in Britain and the US from the 1960s to the late 1980s.

Which British TV chef is often credited with popularising the prawn cocktail in the 1960s?

Food writers Simon Hopkinson and Lindsey Bareham traced its real lineage back to Escoffier. Delia Smith says it has since suffered from 'watery prawns and inferior sauces'.

The word 'scampi' is the Italian name for which crustacean, the original ingredient of the dish?

Americans, lacking langoustines, made it with shrimp and turned 'scampi' into a cooking style. UK labelling law once had to stop monkfish tail being passed off as scampi.

Shrimp and grits is the signature dish of which American regional cuisine?

In coastal South Carolina and Georgia it was originally a breakfast eaten during shrimp season, which peaks around November. Locals called it 'breakfast shrimps'.

Belacan, the pungent Malay condiment, is a fermented paste made from what?

It uses tiny Acetes shrimp, called geragau in Malaysia. Toasted and pounded with chillies and garlic it becomes sambal belacan.

Which Australian fronted the 1984-1990 tourism ads that gave the world the phrase 'shrimp on the barbie'?

The line was actually 'I'll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie for you', and the slogan was 'Come and say G'day'. Australians say prawn, so the phrase is almost never used there.

In Forrest Gump, Forrest buys a shrimp boat in which Alabama town to honour his promise to Bubba?

He pays for it with money from endorsing a ping-pong paddle. A hurricane wipes out every other boat and makes him rich.

Who plays Benjamin Buford 'Bubba' Blue, the shrimp-obsessed soldier in Forrest Gump?

Bubba was meant to be the senior partner in the shrimp business but dies in Vietnam, so Lieutenant Dan takes his place. His famous shrimp monologue was largely improvised from a list.

The first real-life Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurant opened in 1996 in which California city?

It was launched by the Rusty Pelican chain with Paramount, the film's distributor. Landry's bought the chain in 2010.

Which restaurant group has owned Bubba Gump Shrimp Company since 2010?

Landry's is the Houston-based empire behind Rainforest Cafe and Morton's. The Bubba Gump chain now runs from Times Square to Tokyo.

Shrimp are high in which of these, despite being low in saturated fat?

A serving carries 122 to 251 mg per 100 g depending on cooking. Because there is so little saturated fat, it actually improves the LDL-to-HDL ratio.

Triops tadpole shrimp are called 'living fossils' because similar fossils are how old?

Molecular clocks put the split from their nearest relatives at 150 to 230 million years ago. Their eggs survive drying out for years in desert pools.

How does a mantis shrimp use its stalked compound eyes to track a moving object?

Each eye also has three regions that give it depth perception on its own. Their colour vision is odd too: it seems to work like a barcode scanner rather than by comparing channels.

Which country is the major producer of farmed shrimp, where significant farming began in the 1970s?

Farming took off in the 1980s as demand outran supply and trawling drew criticism for bycatch and threats to sea turtles.

What are the ghost or mud shrimp of the infraorder Thalassinidea commonly called in Australia?

The group's unity is uncertain; recent studies suggest splitting it into two infraorders, Gebiidea and Axiidea.

Shrimp trawling yields about 2% of the world's fish catch but what share of global bycatch?

A 1997 FAO study found discard rates as high as 20 pounds of other species for every pound of shrimp landed.