Dear Kid,

Once upon a time, there weren’t any shrimp. Then there were. I leave it to someone else to explain what happened between the “weren’t” and the “were.”

Shrimp are crustaceans. There are peppercorn-crustaceaned shrimp, bread-crustaceaned shrimp, and please-cut-the-crustaceans-off shrimp.

Shrimp tend to be found at the bottom of large bodies of water near the scampi sauce. Shrimp are tiny—some are so small that many animals can’t see them. These are not the type to use in a good shrimp cocktail.

Shrimp keep their hearts in their heads—something some people fail to do. They have looooong antennae (and by “long” I mean about 4 times the length of their bodies) which they use to find food, mates, and cocktail sauce.

There are lots of different kinds of shrimp, all of which are invertebrates meaning they don’t have a backbone. For years, parent shrimp have been sending baby shrimp to self-confidence school hoping they’ll develop some backbone, but they never do.

Speaking of baby shrimp, there tend to be a lot of them. Mama shrimp lay about a million eggs at once which means it is almost impossible to learn the names of all your siblings if you’re a shrimp. Then the Mamas kill the Papas (in many of species anyway). Fortunately, parent shrimp don’t change diapers. The babies mix in with the local plankton until they are big enough to hang out with the big shrimp dudes (can you say oxymoron?).

Shrimp eat pretty much anything that comes their way. This balances out because pretty much everything in or near the water will eat shrimp. Except for the Cleaner Shrimp who are the dentists of the marine world. The Cleaner Shrimp wander around the mouths of other fish, eating fishy leftovers and filling cavities (the cavity in question being the fish’s mouth).

Shrimp generally live about 5 or 6 years unless they throw themselves into the deep fryer to become popcorn shrimp.

Love, Mom