prevalence and molecular characteristics of vibrio species in pre ...

2.2 Shrimp production and trade
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The shrimp industry has boomed during last two decades. South America and
Asia are the two predominant areas of larger scale shrimp production in the world.
South Asian countries contribute 80% of the total world production. Even though
there are many shrimp species, only two of them dominate the industry.
1. Black tiger shrimp (Penaeus monodon) - widely spread in Asian countries,
such as Thailand, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Philippines and
Malaysia
2. Pacific white shrimp (Penaeus vannamei) - commonly found along the Eastern
coast of the Pacific Ocean countries such as Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Peru
and Mexico.
Currently, the white shrimp (Penaeus vannamei) is rapidly replacing the black
tiger shrimp as the main farmed species in Asia. This transformation started in Taipei
China in the late 1990s with the importation of specific-pathogen-free brood stock of
white shrimp from Hawaii and is now cultured in large scale in the People’s Republic
of China,
Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. The reasons for this change is that Penaeus (P.)
vannamei has a faster growth, high yield, low production cost and is able to survive
with a high stocking density when compared with black tiger shrimp (Chinabut et al.,
2006). White shrimps grow to a maximum commercial size of 20g while black tiger
shrimp grow up to 30g. The disadvantage of P. vannamei is the low market price in
the international trade when compared with black tiger shrimp. Therefore large scale
production is necessary in order to generate profits (Weerakoon, 2007).
Over the last decade, the world shrimp production increased remarkably. Data
from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is shown in Table 1, the total
cultured and wild harvest shrimp production in the year 2000 was 4249 thousand
tones and it increased up to 6624 thousand tonnes in the year 2006. Even though wild
shrimp production is seasonal and fluctuates, production remains more or less