48 Fun Facts About Shrimp

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

Flicking the tail to shoot backwards is a reflex, not a decision: giant nerve fibres fire the tail muscles in a split second. Lobsters and crayfish escape the same way.

Shrimp are decapods, a name that literally means what?

Ten-footed, from the Greek, counts the five pairs of walking legs that shrimp share with crabs and lobsters. Squid were once called decapods too, for their ten arms.

Why do grey raw shrimp turn pink when they are cooked?

Heat frees a red pigment called astaxanthin, which a shell protein keeps wrapped up and dull while the animal is alive. Cooking unravels the protein, and lobsters and crabs redden the same way.

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

Neither has a fixed scientific meaning: big commercial species tend to be shrimp in the US and prawns in Britain and Australia, and taxonomists say the two words match no real group of animals.

Dictionaries link the word 'shrimp' to old Germanic words with which meaning?

To shrink or contract is the likely root, shared with 'scrimp', and an Old Norse cousin meant a thin person. English has called a puny person a shrimp since the 14th century.

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

Carl Linnaeus named it in the 1758 edition of his Systema Naturae, the book where scientific animal names officially begin, so no valid name is older. Thomas Pennant added the larger common prawn in 1777.

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

Its antennae are studded with chemical sensors: in lab tests the short pair led shrimp to food by scent, while the long pair mostly feels out the surroundings.

Shrimp blood carries oxygen with copper instead of iron, which tints it what colour?

Blue, because the copper-based carrier haemocyanin is colourless until it picks up oxygen and then turns blue. Octopuses, crabs and spiders have blue blood for the same reason.

Digging ponds for farmed shrimp has destroyed large areas of which tropical coastal habitat?

Mangrove forest was cleared for ponds across Southeast Asia and Latin America. The tangled roots hold coastlines together and shelter young fish, so losing them hurts the wild catch too.

Which seafood chain lost millions in 2023 after making its all-you-can-eat shrimp deal permanent?

Red Lobster put its $20 Ultimate Endless Shrimp on the menu for good and diners ate far more than planned. The deal was blamed for an $11 million quarterly loss, and the chain filed for bankruptcy in 2024.

To test how illness saps a shrimp's stamina, biologists made a viral video star of one doing what?

Running on a treadmill, a home-made one sunk in a tank. Healthy shrimp jogged for hours with little sign of tiring, which gave a baseline for how far an infection slows a sick one.

Which 2009 sci-fi film pens its stranded aliens in a Johannesburg slum, where humans call them 'prawns'?

District 9 has humans sneer at its insect-like aliens as prawns and evict them from their shacks. The story is a pointed echo of apartheid, when whole neighbourhoods were cleared by force.

'Jumbo shrimp' is a favourite example of which figure of speech?

Oxymoron is the term for a phrase that contradicts itself, from the Greek for 'sharp-dull'. The shrimp can back it up, though: a female giant tiger prawn can grow to about a foot long.

In 1376, fishermen petitioned England's Parliament to ban which 'new' way of fishing for ruining their grounds?

Trawling, then a new trick of dragging a fine-meshed net along the bottom, was accused of taking even the tiniest fish and wrecking spawning beds. The complaint is 650 years old and sounds just like the modern one.

Which city's casinos made the bargain shrimp cocktail a tradition after one began selling it for 50 cents in 1959?

Las Vegas got the idea from the Golden Gate casino downtown, which served its first 50-cent shrimp cocktail in 1959. Rivals copied the bargain, and the Golden Gate alone had sold 25 million by 1991.

Mantis shrimp can see which kind of light that is invisible to the human eye?

Ultraviolet is covered by several of their 12 kinds of colour receptor, against three in humans. Yet in 2014 tests they proved worse than people at telling similar colours apart.

A peacock mantis shrimp's punch is too fast for muscle alone, so what powers it?

A spring in its arm, a saddle of shell shaped like a Pringles crisp, is slowly bent by muscle and then let go. The club whips out at about 50 mph, fast enough to crack a snail's shell.

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

Spearers and smashers hunt differently: smashers crack crabs and snails with a hammer-like club, while spearers impale soft prey such as fish on barbed spines.

Shrimp tempura feels thoroughly Japanese, but visitors from which country brought the frying method in the 1500s?

Portugal's visitors first reached Japan in 1543 and brought batter-fried green beans, which Japanese cooks made lighter. The word tempura itself is thought to come from Portuguese too.

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

A flash of light shows the imploding bubble briefly reaches at least 5,000 K, not far off the surface of the Sun. Its discoverers named the glow 'shrimpoluminescence', and it is too faint to see.

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

A goby stands guard while the shrimp digs, and the shrimp keeps a feeler resting on the fish. One flick of the goby's tail and both dive into the burrow.

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

Parasites and dead skin are the meal. The shrimp seem to advertise with a side-to-side rocking dance as a fish swims up.

Which lake long supplied most of the world's brine shrimp eggs, hatched as live food on fish farms?

Great Salt Lake in Utah once supplied most of the market. The 'eggs' are dormant cysts that can sit dry for years and then hatch on demand, which makes them ideal live food for baby fish.

Sea-Monkeys are really brine shrimp, but what did their comic-book adverts draw them as?

A humanoid family, drawn by cartoonist Joe Orlando, looked nothing like what hatched. The monkey in the name came from the shrimp's long tails, which were said to resemble a monkey's.

Brine shrimp eggs rode into orbit on Discovery in 1998 alongside which returning astronaut?

John Glenn, then 77, went back to space as a test subject, because weightlessness thins bone and muscle much as ageing does. He had first orbited the Earth 36 years earlier.

Before they got their famous name, the novelty brine-shrimp pets sold in comic books went by what name?

Instant Life sold for 49 cents through comic-book adverts, but sales were slow. Inventor Harold von Braunhut hired a cartoonist, gave the shrimp a catchier name and relaunched them.

Blue whales, the largest animals alive, feed almost entirely on which shrimp-like creatures?

Krill grow only about 6 cm long, so a blue whale lunges into a dense swarm, gulps tonnes of water at once and strains its catch out through baleen plates.

A pistol shrimp found off Panama and named in 2017 honours which rock band, its discoverers' favourite?

Pink Floyd got the honour for the shrimp's bright pink claw, and because its discoverers were fans. The snap of that claw is loud enough to stun or kill a small fish nearby.

The tiny emperor shrimp of the Indo-Pacific hitches rides on which slow-moving reef animals?

Sea cucumbers and sea slugs get nothing from the deal: the shrimp, barely an inch long, is ferried to fresh feeding grounds and ducks to the far side of its ride when danger threatens.

The cherry shrimp, a bright red favourite of home aquariums, is native to the streams of which region?

Taiwan and East Asia are home, but dumped pets now breed wild in Europe too, in a German stream kept warm by industrial waste heat.

Aquarium keepers prize the Amano shrimp, named after a Japanese aquascaper, for eating what?

Algae was the enemy of Takashi Amano's lush planted tanks, so in the 1980s he set armies of these little shrimp to graze it away. The hobby copied him and named the shrimp in his honour.

The northern prawn changes sex partway through its life, in which direction?

Male first, then female: each one matures as a male at about two and a half years old and turns female a year or so later. So the biggest prawns in any catch are the females.

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

Its digestive tract, so the dark line is simply what the shrimp last ate, grit included. It is harmless, and cooks pull it out of big shrimp mainly for looks and to avoid a sandy crunch.

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

Horseradish gives American cocktail sauce its sinus-clearing kick. British cooks stir mayonnaise into the ketchup instead, which makes the pink Marie Rose sauce of a prawn cocktail.

The harlequin shrimp, often found in pairs, flips which slow reef animals onto their backs to eat them?

Starfish are nearly all it eats. It turns one over and starts on the tube feet, and these 5 cm shrimp will even take on the coral-eating crown-of-thorns.

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

Langoustine, a small slim lobster, is what Italians mean by scampi. Americans had few of them, so they cooked shrimp the same way, and 'scampi' came to mean the garlic-butter style instead.

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

Lowcountry means the marshy coast of South Carolina and Georgia, where today's restaurant favourite began as a humble morning meal in shrimp season. Locals simply called it 'breakfast shrimp'.

Which pungent block of fermented shrimp is pounded with fresh chillies to make a classic Malaysian sambal?

Belacan is toasted first to bring out the flavour. It is rich in glutamate, which gives the savoury taste known as umami.

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

Paul Hogan was still two years away from Crocodile Dundee, the film that made him a star in America. The line was written for Americans: Australians say prawn, so the phrase is rarely heard there.

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

Bayou La Batre is a real shrimping port, and life later copied the film. On screen a hurricane sinks every boat but Forrest's; in 2005 Hurricane Katrina wrecked the town's actual fleet.

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

Mykelti Williamson wore a device that pushed out his lower lip, and it worked too well. Hollywood assumed the studio had simply found an odd-looking unknown, he said, and he had to prove he was an actor.

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

Monterey's Cannery Row got the first restaurant, but not the first Bubba Gump shrimp: a seafood firm had already licensed the film's name for bags of frozen supermarket shrimp.

Shrimp can never be kosher, because Jewish law allows only sea creatures with which two features?

Fins and scales are the test laid down in Leviticus, and a shrimp has neither. The same verse takes lobster and mussels off the table too.

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

Cholesterol scared many people off shrimp. But in a 1996 trial, volunteers eating 300 g a day saw their 'good' HDL rise more than their 'bad' LDL, so the balance between the two got no worse.

The tadpole shrimp Triops, sold in hatch-at-home kits, has a Greek name meaning what?

Three eyes is accurate: two big compound eyes sit close together with a small simple one between them. Its dried eggs can wait years for rain, which is why they can be sold in a packet.

When a mantis shrimp looks around, how do its two stalked eyes move?

Each on its own: one eye can turn left while the other tilts up, and each can also roll on its stalk, a twist that helps it pick out polarised light.

In Australia, anglers pump ghost shrimp out of sandy tidal flats for bait and call them what?

Yabbies, to a saltwater angler, are ghost shrimp sucked out of their burrows in the sand. Inland, the very same word means a freshwater crayfish.

In 1987 the US ordered shrimp boats to fit their nets with a barred escape hatch for which animals?

Sea turtles hit a slanted metal grid and slide out through a flap, while the shrimp slip between the bars into the net. In tests the hatch let 97 percent of turtles escape.