Shrimp Trivia
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48 free Shrimp trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
47 free Shrimp trivia questions with answers. Shrimp are the most eaten seafood in America and among the strangest animals in the sea, and this quiz covers both sides. You will get the biology (why they swim backwards, what deveining removes, how mantis shrimp punch and pistol shrimp make light), the industry (who farms and exports the most, when farms overtook the wild catch) and the culture: prawn cocktail, scampi, shrimp and grits, belacan, Sea-Monkeys, 'shrimp on the barbie' and, of course, Bubba Gump. It suits pub-quiz hosts looking for an offbeat food or nature round, seafood lovers, aquarium hobbyists and anyone who has wondered whether a prawn is just a big shrimp. Questions range from easy to hard so a mixed table can play together. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question carries its source, so if a fact surprises you, you can go and read where it came from.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Shrimp usually swim forward by paddling their swimmerets, but how do they escape danger?
Flicking the tail to shoot backwards
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.
Q 02Shrimp are decapods, a name that literally means what?
Ten-footed
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.
Q 03Why do grey raw shrimp turn pink when they are cooked?
Heat frees a red pigment
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.
Q 04Which of these is true of the names 'shrimp' and 'prawn'?
Neither has a fixed scientific meaning
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.
Q 05Dictionaries link the word 'shrimp' to old Germanic words with which meaning?
To shrink or contract
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.
Q 06Which naturalist described the common shrimp, Crangon crangon, in 1758?
Carl Linnaeus
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.
Q 07Which of these does a shrimp use to 'smell' or 'taste' chemicals in the water?
Its antennae
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.
Q 08Shrimp blood carries oxygen with copper instead of iron, which tints it what colour?
Blue
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.
Q 09Digging ponds for farmed shrimp has destroyed large areas of which tropical coastal habitat?
Mangrove forest
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.
Q 10Which seafood chain lost millions in 2023 after making its all-you-can-eat shrimp deal permanent?
Red Lobster
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.
Q 11To test how illness saps a shrimp's stamina, biologists made a viral video star of one doing what?
Running on a treadmill
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.
Q 12Which 2009 sci-fi film pens its stranded aliens in a Johannesburg slum, where humans call them 'prawns'?
District 9
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.
Q 13'Jumbo shrimp' is a favourite example of which figure of speech?
Oxymoron
Q 21Some snapping shrimp share a burrow with which fish, which acts as a lookout while the shrimp digs?
A goby
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.
Q 22Cleaner shrimp earn their name by picking what off 'client' fish?
Parasites
Parasites and dead skin are the meal. The shrimp seem to advertise with a side-to-side rocking dance as a fish swims up.
Q 23Which lake long supplied most of the world's brine shrimp eggs, hatched as live food on fish farms?
Great Salt Lake, Utah
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.
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.
Q 14In 1376, fishermen petitioned England's Parliament to ban which 'new' way of fishing for ruining their grounds?
Trawling
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.
Q 15Which city's casinos made the bargain shrimp cocktail a tradition after one began selling it for 50 cents in 1959?
Las Vegas
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.
Q 16Mantis shrimp can see which kind of light that is invisible to the human eye?
Ultraviolet
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.
Q 17A peacock mantis shrimp's punch is too fast for muscle alone, so what powers it?
A spring in its arm
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.
Q 18Mantis shrimp are usually sorted into which two groups by the shape of their raptorial claws?
Spearers and smashers
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.
Q 19Shrimp tempura feels thoroughly Japanese, but visitors from which country brought the frying method in the 1500s?
Portugal
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.
Q 20Besides noise, what does the collapsing bubble from a pistol shrimp's snap briefly produce?
A flash of light
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.
Q 24Sea-Monkeys are really brine shrimp, but what did their comic-book adverts draw them as?
A humanoid family
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.
Q 25Brine shrimp eggs rode into orbit on Discovery in 1998 alongside which returning astronaut?
John Glenn
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.
Q 26Before they got their famous name, the novelty brine-shrimp pets sold in comic books went by what name?
Instant Life
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.
Q 27Blue whales, the largest animals alive, feed almost entirely on which shrimp-like creatures?
Krill
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.
Q 28A pistol shrimp found off Panama and named in 2017 honours which rock band, its discoverers' favourite?
Pink Floyd
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.
Q 29The tiny emperor shrimp of the Indo-Pacific hitches rides on which slow-moving reef animals?
Sea cucumbers and sea slugs
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.
Q 30The cherry shrimp, a bright red favourite of home aquariums, is native to the streams of which region?
Taiwan and East Asia
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.