ABSTRACT
Natural environmental changes, e.g., extreme temperatures or salinities, changes in predator balance, storms, and inadequate food production, affect survival and disease incidence in wild populations. Interactions among crustacean hosts, their environment, and disease-causing agents determine health and disease status of individual animals and whole populations. Effects of interrelated factors that determine disease are perhaps most easily studied and understood in captive or cultured crustacean populations. The earliest recognized nutritional disease syndrome of cultured penaeids was originally named “black death” to describe the typical, large black lesions that occur in dying shrimp. Black death disease has not been observed in subadult and adult shrimp and is apparently confined to the juvenile stages of the species. Cramped muscle syndrome (CMS) of penaeid shrimp has also been called “cramped tail,” “body cramp,” and “bent tail”.
