Shrimp aquaculture presently produces approximately one million metric tons of shrimp annually. While some 20 species are cultured in various parts of the world, the majority of production is based on eight species (Table1). For the eastern hemisphere, the fast growing giant tiger shrimp Penaeus monodon is the most important, while in the western hemisphere, the white shrimp Litopenaeus vannamei is the leading production species.

Shrimp have a complicated life cycle (Figure 1). Eggs from the female are broadcast into the marine environment. Hatching from the egg, the larvae pass through three distinct stages, nauplius, zoea and mysis, before assuming the distinctive adult morphology as post-larval or juvenile shrimp. The distinction between post-larva and juvenile is slight. Generally, the term post-larva is used for the first
month and juvenile thereafter.

Depending on one’s focus, shrimp aquaculture either started as trapping and holding of wild seed (Ling et al., 1977), or with the development of modern production techniques arising out of the research of the Japanese scientist Motosaku Fujinaga (Fast,1992). The “trap and hold” approach requires little effort on the part of the farmer, but yields are low and unpredictable. Traditionally with this type of
approach, the shrimp feed and grow on available pond organisms. In some cases where additional seed is sourced from the wild, supplementary feed may be added to the pond. Availability of seed is often the limiting factor for shrimp farmers using the “trap and hold” approach.

This bottleneck was partially bypassed by Fujinaga’s development of methods allowing captive reproduction of shrimp, starting with gravid females obtained from the wild, and completion of the larval cycle in hatcheries.