What is a Fresh Water Prawn?

What is a freshwater Prawn...  First let me say what it isn't.  It isn't a crawdad or a crawfish.  I have been amazed at how many people think that.  Now that I have that out of the way, here is an image that will give you a little better idea.  This will show you a natural ocean shrimp, a freshwater prawn and a crawdad.

Now, once you get the shell and all the outer parts off of the shrimp and the prawn, you cannot tell them apart.  For those of you who feel there would be a definite taste difference, you would be right. However you might be surprised in what that taste difference would be.  I'll post those results from a blind taste test done in Florida in another post.  Let's just say that those darned freshwater prawn are tasty...  But, you can see that a crawdad looks nothing like the freshwater prawn.

One of the issues that we have here in the states is that with so much of our seafood coming in from overseas, and it is already cleaned and no head (finfish) or anything else to tell what it actually is, we really don't know what we are getting.  We have to trust.  In this case, when the head and shell is removed and you buy your "shrimp" from the grocer, we are hoping that it is shrimp and not prawn.  No, there isn't anything wrong with prawn, but if you are expecting shrimp, you just hope you are buying shrimp.  It is much worse with sea food caught in the ocean where they are actually doing all of the processing at sea.  If one fish has the appearance and a taste that is close to another, they can catch a lesser expensive fish and sell it as a more expensive fish making a bundle, and the buyers are just hoping that they are getting what they are buying.

It is a big big problem, and all we can do is ask the overseas countries to get tougher on their laws.  But we are getting off the topic.  So there are you examples of a shrimp, freshwater prawn and crawdad.