For centuries, several species of prawns and crabs have been raised from wild-caught juveniles in coastal brackish-water fish ponds in various countries of south east Asia. The Indonesian "tambaks" are well known examples of such traditional practices. In western countries, since the turn of the century, advances of marine biology and fast increase of marine fisheries enabled the development of large-scale production and release of larval stages of American and European lobsters in a fruitless attempt to restock natural populations. After the Second World War, the increasing demand for crustaceans in United States and Japan was satisfied by opening new prawn fisheries all over the world. A major breakthrough was achieved with the development of hatchery technologies for the penaeid prawn Penaeus japonicus (Hudinaga, 1942 in Japan) and the caridean prawn Macrobrachium rosenbergii (Ling, 1969 in Malaysia), which occurred during the first decades of the second half of this century. Together with the increasing market demand in developed countries for sea food, this led to a considerable interest of both public agencies and private investors in marine shrimp and prawn culture. In western countries, a large number of pioneering commercial ventures, often based on assumptions not scientifically founded, failed. Nevertheless, the aquaculture production of prawns mainly based on wild-caught juveniles increased in South-East Asia and Central America during the 1980s. This overall positive trend should not hide important failures which occurred at a local scale, such as the Taiwanese crisis of 1988 due principally to environmental degradation, resulting in severe disease problems and a near collapse of the farming activity. Following the early period of hatchery technology development, the major scientific achievements were related to food requirements and formulation of compound diets for larvae, juveniles and adults and to a better knowledge of diseases caused by bacteria and several viruses which have been identified from hatcheries and intensive farming ponds. Additional new technological advances have emerged from recent research in the fields of physiology (endocrinology) and genetics. By far, the major part of the world production of marine crustaceans relies on penaeid prawns and, to a lesser extent, on Macrobrachium species. However, some other species of marine crustaceans have potential for aquaculture.

The economic aspects of marine crustacean aquaculture should be considered together with those of the fishing industry: market prices are rather similar, depending on the quality of the product. The balance between market demand and production is an important constraint which, in turn, establishes the success of prawn farming. Since the early 1980s, crustacean aquaculture has increased tremendously in both Asiaand America: the world production for 1991 approximated 700,000 tons, with more than 600,000 tonsfrom penaeid prawn culture.