This species lives naturally from Southeast Asia to the shore of East Africa (to Somali). Significant natural caught quantity however concentrates around India and Indonesia.
When the shrimp industry developed speedly with the improved and sophisticated intensive-culture method, the shrimp seeds no longer depends on natural sources. It is totally managed in hatcheries. This accelerates more the shrimp culture techniques, and density per square meter is much higher and yield per hectare is much bigger. In fact it is not uncommon for a production of 8 metric tons of shrimp per 1 hectare. Thailand is the pioneer in this industry and shrimp culture soon expands to other countries in Southeast Asia and South Asia and many other country around the world.
Shrimp body consists of these main parts: head, body and tail.
The head consists legs, cheliped, maxilliped, antennae, rostrum and eyes. Body consist of six segments, with swimmerets in the lower part. Inside the body, there is a vein. The tail part consists of a pointed part called telson and tail fans.
In processing, the meat attaching to the body after the head being removed is called hanging meat, or throat meat. The vein runs from the head part through the back of shrimp body to the tail.
Terminology
There are terms particularly used in shrimp processing. Most of these terms are of English origin, however they are commonly known widely in the industry. Some words comes from Japanese. Below are some common terms useful for us if we want to know more shrimp products.
1. HOSO: head on shell-on
2. HLSO: headless shell-on
3. PD (or PND): (shell) peeled and (vein) deveined
4. PUD: (shell) peeled and undeveined
5. PTO: (shell) peeled tail-on. Note that the sixth segment and the tail part untouched in this case.
6. SUSHI: Cooked sushi prepared from cooked-in-shell shrimp then peel, cut, trim before laying on the tray and put into bag, vacuum sealed and packed into cartons and is used for Japanese sushi.
7. NOBASHI: Nobashi is a PTO product, but processed manually stretched, shrimp body is made with some cuts, (usually 4 cuts), tail part trimmed or scratched...With such more manual work, this item is usually refered as a separate type of product called nobashi..
We can devided shrimp products into two categories: the frozen raw products and the cooed (ready for use) products. Further description is necessary to refer to process form: whether it is HOSO, HLSO, PD, PTO, etc. Also, freezing form, usually IQF or block is needed for a full description.
Please read on next part to have further information on products.
Cont.
Raw Product
Products 
