Seafood Handbook Shellfish Page

The Seafood Handbook is the most comprehensive seafood directory available online. Featuring more than 100 of the most common seafood species in the U.S. market, the Seafood Handbook is the ultimate guide to seafood sourcing and preparation, brought to you by the editors of SeaFood Business magazine. And it’s free!

Search by finfish or shellfish, or by geographic region. For each type of seafood species, there is a comprehensive overview of the item, its origin, history, availability, product attributes, nutritional value and cooking tips, along with an original hand-drawn depiction.

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Striped like its jungle namesake, the black tiger shrimp is available year-round and is one of Asia’s major aquaculture products. Most tiger shrimp is farmed, though a significant amount is harvested from the wild by trawlers working mud bottoms from very shallow water to depths beyond 300 feet.… Read More
Softshell is actually a misnomer for this clam, whose oval-shaped shell is actually thin and very brittle. Softshell clams average 1 1/2 to 3 inches in length. Their shell cannot close completely because of a protruding siphon. For this reason, softshell clams have a shorter shelf life than their… Read More
Brown, white and pink shrimp are a triad of warmwater animals known collectively as “Gulf shrimp.” Commercially important to both the United States and Mexico, Gulf shrimp are found along the southeastern U.S. coast, as far north as Maryland, and along the entire western Gulf, particularly on… Read More
These clams are rarely sold by the name “hardshell” or “quahog,” but instead are sold by names reflecting size (1 1/2 to 5 inches), from  littlenecks to cherrystones, topnecks and chowders. On the West Coast, Manila clams and Washington steamer clams are sometimes called littlenecks,… Read More
There are several species of langostino, but the one most commonly marketed is Pleuroncodes monodon, a small, lobster-like crustacean found in the cold, deep waters off the coast of Chile, where it is known as langostino colorado. A related  langostino, P. planipes, also called tuna crab, ranges… Read More
The North American snow crab fishery targets three species: Chionoecetes opilio, C. bairdi and C. tanneri. Technically, opilios are snow crabs, and bairdis are tanners. Alaska’s opilio fishery occurs in the Bering Sea and is much larger than its bairdi fishery. Bairdi are taken in the Bering Sea… Read More

At one time held in low esteem, the blue mussel has become an aquaculture and culinary success story. While they grow wild, mussels are also farmed in Europe and on both coasts of North America. Maine is the largest U.S. producer, but the domestic market also draws farmed mussels from

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Unlike the native Eastern oyster, the Pacific oyster is a Japanese transplant, brought to this country after the turn of the century to revitalize the West Coast oyster industry after its native Olympia species (Ostrea lurida) crashed. Hearty and easy to propagate, the Pacific oyster is now the… Read More
There are about 500 species of sea urchins worldwide, but the major commercially valuable species in the United States are the red, green and purple sea urchins. The spherical echinoderms have a hard, spiny shell called a “test,” which contains a star-shaped mass comprising five skeins of… Read More
More than 200 species of freshwater prawns, all members of the family Palaemonidae, are important to the commercial market. The most important belong to the genus Macrobrachium, and the freshwater shrimp most common to Western markets is the giant M. rosenbergii, also known as giant river prawn. It… Read More