My roommate use to buy shrimp to feed it to his fish and frog. Whenever there's left over shrimp in the tank, he just leaves them and some of them end up dying. A peculiar thing happens to their carcass after a few days in the tank though. The shrimp's body turns pink and red like it's been cooked. Anybody know why that happens? Is it the shrimp equivalent of spontaneous combustion?
2007-03-22 11:59:03 · 1 answers · asked by Anonymous in Science & Mathematics ➔ Zoology
No, sadly, its not shrimp spontaneous combustion .
Its just it decomposing. Shrimp change colour when they are cooked because the chemical makeup of the shrimp is altered under heat. The same happens when it decomposes.
There is a chemical in animals like shrimp that make them naturally pink, its just usually masked by all the other pigments. So cooking or decomposing removes those other pigments and leaves the pink behind. This is why flamingos are pink (they are absorbing the pink pigment from their diet.)
2007-03-22 15:03:23 · answer #1 · answered by Beef 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋