Asian Tiger Shrimp

• Its large-scale farming drove the clearance of enormous areas of mangrove in South-East Asia, an environmental impact that has marked the history of aquaculture.
• It has established itself as an invader in the western Atlantic, from the United States to Brazil, after escapes from farms.
• A single female can release close to a million eggs in one spawning.
• This is the Asian tiger shrimp, the second most farmed shrimp species in the world, behind only the whiteleg shrimp.
• Its farming transformed entire economies in South-East Asia: production went from 21,000 tonnes in 1981 to close to half a million in 1993, and in 2009 the trade was worth some 3.65 billion dollars.
• And it also razed mangroves: much of the expansion of the farms was carried out by clearing coastal mangrove, one of the most productive ecosystems on the planet.
• Since 2002 it has lost ground to the whiteleg shrimp, which grows faster and tolerates higher densities, and many Asian farms have switched species.
• White spot syndrome virus is its great threat in farming: it can kill an entire pond in a few days.
• It escaped from a South Carolina farm in 1988, when a flood released some 2,000 individuals, and since 2006 it has appeared regularly in the Gulf of Mexico and along the US Atlantic coast.
• It tolerates salinities from 2 to 30, which explains why it colonises everything from mangroves to the open sea.

Skeleton type

Invertebrate - chitin exoskeleton (crustacean)

Habitat and environment

Coastal bottoms and estuaries of the Indo-Pacific; juveniles in mangroves

Sources consulted: Wikipedia (en): Penaeus monodon