Shrimp
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Shrimp. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a small shellfish allied to the lobster, the crab, and the crayfish. Shrimps have two pairs of antennae and five pairs of legs. They fairly swarm along the sandy coasts of western Europe. The London market is supplied with large quantities taken in scoop nets at high tide . Like the lobster, shrimps turn red in boiling water. There are also fresh-water shrimps--tiny creatures closely resembling their larger salt-water relatives. A pailful of water taken from a grassy marsh almost anywhere is pretty certain to contain several transparent, active little fellows so small as barely to be seen with the naked eye. They are untiring in pursuit of still smaller creatures, and unless checked by a wire screen are likely to eat up all small forms of animal life in an aquarium. See Crayfish
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a popular name for any individual of the genus Crangon, allied prawn. The to lobster, crayfish, and tapering, and form is elongated, arched. short, claws small, The rostrum is very being merely a small the fixed finger finger unciform. The tooth, the movable delicate and subtranswhole structure is alarmed they bury themlucent. When a peculiar motion selves in the sand by shrimp (C. of the telson. The common two inches long, greenvulgaris), about with brown, is esteemed ish-gray gray dotted are usually as an article of food. They Pandalus antaken by a net. Also, the northern waters of nulicornis, taken in the is reddish- Europe. When alive its color boiled it begray, with red spots. When comes a deep red.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both entries treat the shrimp purely as a wild-caught animal: Aiton's in 1910 describes London's supply "taken in scoop nets at high tide," and Collier's in 1921 says of Crangon vulgaris that "they are usually taken by a net." That is no longer where most shrimp come from. Industrial pond farming, which grew from the 1970s onward and centres on the Pacific white shrimp Penaeus vannamei and the giant tiger prawn, now supplies roughly half the world's shrimp, with output measured in millions of tonnes a year from Ecuador, India, Vietnam, China and Indonesia; the associated clearing of coastal mangrove has become a standard conservation complaint. One small correction: the near-invisible "fresh-water shrimps" Aiton's promises in a pailful of marsh water are mostly not shrimp at all, but amphipods, copepods and water fleas, which modern zoology places well away from the true decapods.
Written for this edition, 2026.