When you peel shrimp, they are regularly in between with a weak armour. My mother said they were dead before they were cooked, but in Nieuwpoort a shrimp fisherman said it was due to a growth jump. It seems to me both possible, but which is correct?
Answer
Sorry for your mama’s wisdom, but the shrimp fisherman is correct.
Shrimp, but also (among other things) spiders are, as it were, trapped in a hard external skeleton. That outer skeleton doesn’t grow with it. The creatures do grow, so at a certain moment they get really tight in their skeleton.
That is why the animal creates a new, larger, skeleton, under the hard skeleton. To grow, the hard skeleton has to break open and the animal crawls out of the old skeleton with the new, soft skeleton. This molt can easily be found in a spider’s web, for example, as a ‘dead spider’.
Once out of the old skeleton, the animal stretches well (the animal has then effectively grown and thus become larger) after which the skeleton hardens. That takes a while – during that period the critters are very vulnerable.
There is also a real chance that they are trapped in the old skeleton and die. If they are fished during that period, boiled (and then die) and end up in your plate to be peeled, the skeleton effectively feels soft.
Answered by
dr. Christine Van der Heyden
Doctorate: developmental biology on zebrafish, tooth development, gene expression patterns (ISH), in vitro cultures of tissues, histology (LM and TEM) Teaching assignment: lab biotechnology, biochemical analysis techniques, immunology. Environmental subjects.
Jozef Kluyskensstraat 2 B-9000 Ghent
http://www.hogent.be/
.