Shrimp farming environment design significantly affects both welfare and disease outcomes. Understanding what better environments look like informs welfare advocacy.
Shrimp farming environment design affects welfare through water quality management and behavioral opportunity provision. Shrimp in environments with poor dissolved oxygen experience physiological stress that, given growing evidence of crustacean sentience, may involve welfare-relevant suffering. The extreme densities of super-intensive systems eliminate any natural behavioral expression from animals that in wild conditions would range across substrate, aggregate in temperature gradients, and engage in complex foraging. While the welfare evidence for shrimp is less developed than for vertebrates, precautionary reasoning supports preferring systems that maintain good water quality and avoid extreme density. Biofloc systems that maintain ecological complexity within tanks may provide marginally richer environments than bare high-density systems, although welfare evidence specific to shrimp is limited.