This seafood trivia quiz has 100 free questions with answers and covers everything that comes out of the water and ends up on a plate: lobster and crab, oysters, mussels and scallops, shrimp, squid and sea urchin, plus the great fish dishes of the world, from sushi and ceviche to fish and chips, bouillabaisse and Portugal's salt cod. There are questions on the science of seafood (why lobsters turn red, why oysters make pearls), on food history (who fried the first chips with fish, where the lobster roll was invented) and on the frankly alarming things people eat on purpose, like fermented shark and pufferfish liver. It works for a restaurant trivia night, a seafood boil, a beach party or a pub quiz round. Difficulty runs from easy openers to a handful of expert questions about caviar economics and geoduck lifespans. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic or primary source, and each question carries a citation you can inspect, so if a fact surprises you, you can see exactly where it comes from.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Lobsters have blue blood because their blood carries oxygen using a compound built around which metal?
Copper
Vertebrates use iron-rich hemoglobin instead, which is why our blood is red.
Q 02The heaviest lobster ever caught, just over 20 kg per Guinness, came from the waters of which Canadian province?
Nova Scotia
Lobsters keep growing throughout their lives, adding new muscle cells at every moult.
Q 03A cooked lobster turns orange because heat breaks down a protein that had been masking which pigment?
Astaxanthin
The same pigment is what farmed salmon are fed to give their flesh its pink colour.
Q 04In colonial New England lobster was so abundant it was thought of as food for whom?
Servants and the poor
The oft-repeated claim that laws banned serving it to servants more than twice a week has no evidence behind it.
Q 05The lobster roll is commonly credited to a restaurant called Perry's in which Connecticut town?
Milford
The Connecticut style is served warm with butter; the Maine version most people picture is cold with mayonnaise.
Q 06Under ideal laboratory conditions a single oyster can filter roughly how much water in a day?
190 litres
Chesapeake Bay's historic oyster reefs once filtered the entire volume of the estuary every three or four days.
Q 07The nucleus placed in an oyster to start a cultured pearl is usually a polished piece of what?
Mussel shell
It then takes three to seven years for the oyster to coat the nucleus in enough nacre to make a perfect pearl.
Q 08Oysters Rockefeller was invented in 1889 at Antoine's because it ran short of what?
Snails
It was named after John D. Rockefeller, then the richest American, because the sauce was so rich.
Q 09Which tetrodotoxin-laden fish may only be prepared in Japanese restaurants by specially licensed chefs?
Pufferfish
Only chefs who have qualified after three or more years of rigorous training are allowed to prepare it.
Q 10Serving which part of the fugu, its tastiest and most poisonous, was banned in Japanese restaurants in 1984?
The liver
The Kabuki star Bandō Mitsugorō VIII died in 1975 after eating four servings of it, insisting he was immune.
Q 11In which Japanese city, then under its old name, did Hanaya Yohei invent nigiri sushi around 1824?
Edo
It was the fast food of Edo's townspeople, sold from street stalls long before it became fine dining.
Q 12The first conveyor belt sushi restaurant, Genroku Zushi, opened in what year?
1958
The idea went national after Genroku won an award at the Osaka World Expo in 1970.
Q 13Traditionally, the word caviar refers only to the roe of which fish?
Sturgeon
The world's largest caviar company today is Chinese, farming sturgeon in a lake in Zhejiang.
Q 14Iran's 'Almas' caviar comes from the eggs of a rare albino fish aged between how many years?
Q 21The five-toothed chewing organ of a sea urchin is named after which ancient philosopher?
Aristotle
The 'lantern' likely referred to the whole animal, which looks like the horn lamps of his day; the edible part sold as uni is the gonads.
Q 22Bouillabaisse, the Provençal fish soup, originated in which port city?
Marseille
In 1980 eleven Marseille restaurateurs signed a Bouillabaisse Charter fixing the ingredients and method, and it must include rascasse.
Q 23Lutefisk, the Nordic Christmas dish, is dried whitefish that has been cured in what?
Lye
Straight out of the lye the fish has a pH of 11 to 12 and is inedible; days of soaking bring it back.
60 and 100
Russia banned the harvest and sale of black caviar in 2007 after wild stocks collapsed from over-fishing.
Q 15Which immigrant opened the first recorded fish and chip shop in Bow, East London, around 1860?
Joseph Malin
When Malin's closed in the 1970s its recipe and fryer design were sold to the US chain Arthur Treacher's, where a few Ohio outlets still use them.
Q 16During the Second World War, fish and chips held what special status in Britain?
It was never rationed
Winston Churchill called the pairing 'the good companions'.
Q 17Ceviche is recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of which country?
Peru
The word first appears in writing in an 1820 patriotic song called 'La Chicha', considered Peru's first national anthem.
Q 18Paella takes its name from the word for what in Catalan and Valencian?
Frying pan
Valencians insist the only 'true' paella contains rabbit, chicken, duck and snails; the seafood version is paella de marisco.
Q 19Which style of clam chowder is made with a clear broth, using neither milk nor tomatoes?
Rhode Island
The tomato-based Manhattan style is often traced to Rhode Island's Portuguese fishing communities rather than to New York.
Q 20Imitation crab sticks are made from surimi, a paste most often based on which fish?
Alaska pollock
Japan has been making surimi since 1115, originally for the steamed fish cake kamaboko.
Q 24Swedish shops release each year's surströmming on the third Thursday of which month?
August
The old royal decree no longer applies but retailers keep the 'premiere' date and often sell out within minutes.
Q 25Iceland's fermented national dish hákarl is made from the meat of which animal?
Greenland shark
The fresh meat is poisonous because of its urea content; Anthony Bourdain called the cured version the worst thing he had ever eaten.
Q 26According to amphora inscriptions, the Roman fish sauce garum was most often made from which fish?
Mackerel
Pliny the Elder bluntly described garum as 'the liquor from putrefaction', yet it appears throughout the Roman cookbook Apicius.
Q 27Which small fish is a key ingredient of both Worcestershire sauce and Caesar salad dressing?
Anchovy
The Peruvian anchovy fishery is one of the largest in the world, though most of the catch becomes fishmeal rather than dinner.
Q 28Which sea snail has an ear-shaped shell with a row of holes and is called pāua in New Zealand?
Abalone
The iridescent inner shell is a major source of decorative mother-of-pearl.
Q 29The geoduck, the world's largest burrowing clam, has a typical lifespan of about how many years?
140
Its name comes from the Lushootseed word gʷidəq; in Chinese it is literally the 'elephant-trunk clam'.
Q 30In 1983 which US state named the crawfish its official state crustacean?
Louisiana
The state produces about 100 million pounds of them a year, mostly red swamp and white river crayfish.