Macrobrachium rosenbergii has been farmed for more than half a century. Its history is unusually well recorded — and it still carries one question the field opened, and never closed.
This hub reads that history in order: the prawn and the industry that grew up around it, the biology that governs how it grows, the markets that scaled around it, and the Australian chapter — arriving at a question first asked in the 1980s, left unfinished, and now worth asking again.
It is the history of a question, not of an answer. Each part stands alone on The Plot; read in sequence, they arrive — on their own — at where SHRMP.bio comes in: the same question, in a system where it can finally be measured.
Prologue
I — The prawn and the early industry
Where it comes from, and how a wild-caught delicacy became a farmed crop.
- The larvae that needed the sea A newly hatched larva, just under two millimetres long, swims upside down and must reach where the river meets the sea — the one fact every hatchery has had to solve.
- The hatchery that gave its prawns away Freshwater prawn farming across the Western Hemisphere descends, almost entirely, from thirty-six prawns brought from Malaysia to a Honolulu research hatchery in the 1960s.
- Science in Hawaii, an industry in Thailand Hawaii’s biggest prawn farm never turned a profit — and the science and the industry it seeded grew up on opposite sides of the world.
- The prawn you catch yourself In 1991, Taiwan had between 500 and 600 venues where you paid to catch your own prawns, cooked on the spot — an industry built by a pastime, not an export market.
II — The question the field left open
The biology that decides how these prawns grow — and the line of inquiry that stopped.
- Even the pond has office politics Raised together, from the same hatch, male prawns do not grow up equal — three kinds of male, and a social order that decides which ones get big.
- The question nobody finished In 1981, N. R. Howe found the prawns’ moults came in waves, not at random — the start of a question about a signal in the water the field never finished.
III — The market and the workaround
How the industry scaled: by going around the prawn, not through it.
- Scampi for Europe The boom that proved the market, and the collapse that followed.Coming soon
- Three hundred thousand tonnes, around the prawn How production reached industrial scale by engineering around the prawn rather than answering its biology.Coming soon
IV — What we can and cannot know
Reading a field whose own record can't always be taken at face value.
- Why the old papers can't be taken at face value The reasons decades of published results have to be read with care.Coming soon
- The switch Coming soon
- What the prawn hears Sound, newly measured — and what it says about a species long assumed to be simple.Coming soon
- The prawn at night Night behaviour, newly measured, and the senses the early studies missed.Coming soon
V — The Australian story
The native prawn, and Australia's attempts to farm it.
- The native prawn, and its two names The Australian giant freshwater prawn, and the two names it goes by.Coming soon
- Jarramba The Kimberley attempt — and what it ran into.Coming soon
- Twenty prawns to two hundred thousand A hatchery result worth pausing on.Coming soon
- The taxonomy twist The reclassification that reframes the Australian chapter.Coming soon
VI — The next frontier
Where the old question gets asked again — in a system that can measure the answer.
- The question, asked again A closed system where water, light and space can be measured and set, and the 1980s question asked once more. This is where SHRMP.bio comes in — shown through the first experimental loop running, not through a pitch.Coming soon
Pillar two of three. If there is a real unanswered question here — and the arc is built to let you decide that for yourself — the other pillars are what SHRMP.bio does about it.
The strategy — why not a farm, and what we own instead → More from SHRMP.bio on The Plot → The research plans — pillar three — follow.