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Friday 12 January 2018

Shrimp

The shrimp is a small crustacean related to the prawn.

Mantis shrimp Pixabay

THE ANIMAL

There are thousands of species of shrimp, and usually there is a species adapted to any particular habitat. Any small crustacean which resembles a shrimp tends to be called one.

Adult shrimp are filter feeding animals that live close to the seafloor on most coasts and estuaries, as well as in rivers and lakes.

Shrimps can swim rapidly backwards, but to escape predators some species flip off the seafloor and dive into the sediment.

Shrimp are often solitary, though they can form large schools during the spawning season.

The shrimp, unlike the crab or lobster, has thin fragile legs which they use primarily for perching.

Pixibay

The common shrimp is greenish, semi-transparent, has its first pair of legs ending in pincers, processes no rostrum (the beak-like structure which extends forward from the head in some crustaceans), and has comparatively shorter antennae than the prawn.

Pistol shrimps, which are about an inch long and generally live in the Mediterranean, emit a deafening crack with their claws to stun prey. This snapping shrimp competes with much larger animals such as the sperm whale for loudest animal in the sea. The sound of every shrimp snapping their claws at once would reach 246 decibels.

The pistol shrimp snapping sound so loud, US submarines would hover above colonies of them because the noise kept them from being detected by Japanese sonar.

Pistol Shrimp By Haplochromis 

The mantis shrimp's claws serve as a built-in club and spear and can accelerate at 102,000 m/s squared. Even a small mantis shrimp could do some real damage to a human, if threatened and in ideal conditions to do so.

Some species of mantis shrimps are capable of breaking through aquarium glass with a single strike.

The Californian Green Shrimp uses rafts to get around. It is carried across the surface of the sea on buoyant objects such as floating clumps of seaweed, and this aids in the shrimp's dispersal to new locations.

A shrimp's heart is in its head.

A shrimp has more than a hundred pair of chromosomes in each cell nucleus.

FOOD

The shrimp plays important roles in the food chain are an important nutrition source for larger animals from fish to whales.

As with other seafood, shrimp is high in calcium, iodine and protein but low in food energy.

Commercial shrimp species support an industry worth 50 billion dollars a year. In 2010 the total commercial production of shrimp was nearly 7 million tonnes.

The most extensively fished species are the akiami paste shrimp, the northern prawn, the southern rough shrimp, and the giant tiger prawn. Together these four species account for nearly half of the total wild capture.

Pixabay

Shrimp farming took off during the 1980s, particularly in China, and by 2007 the harvest from shrimp farms exceeded the capture of wild shrimp.

Drunken shrimp is a dish popular in China, consisting of shrimp placed in strong liquor and then eaten alive.

More than 60,000 pounds of shrimp are consumed in Las Vegas each day, which is higher than the rest of the United States combined.

Barack Obama's favorite meal is wife Michelle’s shrimp linguine.

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