Dendrobranchiata is a suborder of decapods, commonly known as prawns. There are 540 extant species in seven families, and a fossil record extending back to the Devonian. They differ from related animals, such as Caridea and Stenopodidea, by the branching form of the gills and by the fact that they do not brood their eggs, but release them directly into the water. They may reach a length of over 330 millimetres (13 in) and a mass of 450 grams (1.0 lb), and are widely fished and farmed for human consumption.
The Decapoda or decapods are an order of crustaceans within the class Malacostraca, including many familiar groups, including crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, and prawns. Most decapods are scavengers. The order is estimated to contain nearly 15,000 species in around 2,700 genera, with around 3,300 fossil species. Nearly half of these species are crabs, with the shrimp and Anomura including hermit crabs, porcelain crabs, squat lobsters making up the bulk of the remainder. The earliest fossils of the group date to the Devonian.
Penaeus is a genus of prawns, including the giant tiger prawn, the most important species of farmed crustacean worldwide. The genus has been reorganised following a proposition of Pérez Farfante and Kensley based on morphological differences, in particular the genital characteristics of these animals, although this revision has not been universally accepted. Following the revision, many species formerly in the genus Penaeus have been reassigned to new genera in the family Penaeidae: Farfantepenaeus, Fenneropenaeus, Litopenaeus, and Marsupenaeus. The following table gives an overview:
Farfantepenaeus notialis is a species of marine crustacean in the family Penaeidae.
Rimapenaeus is a genus of prawns. It comprises six species, including the "roughneck shrimp", Rimapenaeus constrictus:
Acanthochirana is an extinct genus of prawn that existed during the upper Jurassic period. It was named by E. Strand in 1928, and its type species is Acanthochirana cordata. They are distinguished from the related genus Aeger by the presence of teeth on the rostrum, which are absent in Aeger.
Benthesicymus is a genus of prawns, containing the following species:
Hakelocaris vavassorii is an extinct species of prawn belonging to the family Penaeidae. It was named in 1994 by Alessandro Garassino, and is the only species in the genus Hakelocaris.
Metapenaeopsis, the velvet shrimps, is a prawn genus in the family Penaeidae. It contains these species:
Sicyonia is a genus of prawns, placed in its own family, Sicyoniidae. It differs from other prawns in that the last three pairs of its pleopods are uniramous, rather than biramous as seen in all other prawns.
Marsupenaeus is a monotypic genus of prawn. It contains a single species, Marsupenaeus japonicus, known as the kuruma shrimp, kuruma prawn, or Japanese tiger prawn. It occurs naturally in bays and seas of the Indo-West Pacific, but has also reached the Mediterranean Sea as a Lessepsian migrant. It is one of the largest species of prawns, and is accordingly one of the most economically important species in the family.
Isabel Pérez Farfante was a Cuban-born carcinologist. She was the first Cuban woman to receive her Ph.D. from an Ivy League school. She returned to Cuba from the United States only to be blacklisted by Fidel Castro's government. She and her family escaped Cuba, and she became one of the world's foremost zoologists studying prawns. She discovered large populations of shrimp off the coast of Cuba and published one of the most noted books on shrimps: "Penaeoid and Sergestoid Shrimps and Prawns of the World. Keys and Diagnoses for the Families and Genera."
Trachysalambria curvirostris is a species of prawn that lives in shallow waters of the Indo-West Pacific. It is one of the most important species targeted by prawn fishery, with annual harvests of more than 300,000 t, mostly landed in China.
Trachysalambria is a genus of prawns, containing ten species. It was erected in 1934 by Martin Burkenroad, as a subgenus of Trachypenaeus, with T. curvirostris as its type species. That subgenus was elevated to the rank of genus in 1997 by Isabel Pérez Farfante and Brian Kensley. The ten species are:
Farfantepenaeus aztecus is a species of marine penaeid shrimps found around the east coast of the US and Mexico. They are an important commercial species in the US. The FAO refers to them as the northern brown shrimp; other common names, used in the US, are brown shrimp, golden shrimp, red shrimp or redtail shrimp.
Aristeidae is a family of Dendrobranchiata decapod crustaceans known as deep-sea shrimps, gamba prawns or gamba shrimps. Some species are subject to commercial fisheries.
Solenocera is a genus of prawns in the family Solenoceridae. Solenocera occur from 0 to 2,067 meters deep in the ocean.
Metapenaeopsis commensalis is a species of crustacean in the family Penaeidae first described by Lancelot Alexander Borradaile in 1898.
Metapenaeopsis miersi is a crustacean species in the family Penaeidae described by Lipke Bijdeley Holthuis in 1952.
The eastern king prawn is an edible dendrobranch prawn endemic to eastern Australia. Its scientific name is Melicertus plebejus or Penaeus plebejus. It is caught by commercial and recreational fishers for human food.
