Animals like fish are caught and farmed to feed farmed shrimp, increasing the negative welfare effects of shrimp farming
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Develop alternative foods that taste like shrimp to help reduce demand for farmed shrimp
FWIW, given the moral ambiguity of fishing, the catch of wild animals for (shrimp) feed could be good overall for wild (aquatic) animals, instead of bad.
This and the effects of shrimp feed (crop) production on terrestrial wild animals make me somewhat inclined not to try to shift shrimp consumption towards plant-based food (substitutes or general reduction). My best guess is that crop production tends to decrease wild arthropod populations (Attwood et al., 2008, tables 3 and 4; Newbold et al., 2015), and animal products tend to decrease wild terrestrial arthropod populations more than plant-based products due to greater land use for crops per calorie or kg of protein (e.g. Our World in Data, based on Poore & Nemecek, 2018), so shifting towards plant-based would be bad for wild terrestrial arthropods, if they have bad lives or you’re suffering-focused.
However, farmed shrimp/​prawns may use less land than plant-based foods per gram of protein, so maybe shifting away from them would be good by reducing wild terrestrial arthropod populations, too. This is something I’d like to look more into. I imagine land use for shrimp/​prawns is only so low according to these estimates because they’re assuming a high rate of wild aquatic ingredients (whose impacts are morally ambiguous!). You probably can’t get lower land use than tofu per kg of protein by feeding shrimp almost entirely soy and grains, because of higher losses in feed conversion than in soy processing into tofu (and tofu having similar or less land use than other feed ingredients per kg of protein).
FWIW, given the moral ambiguity of fishing, the catch of wild animals for (shrimp) feed could be good overall for wild (aquatic) animals, instead of bad.
This and the effects of shrimp feed (crop) production on terrestrial wild animals make me somewhat inclined not to try to shift shrimp consumption towards plant-based food (substitutes or general reduction). My best guess is that crop production tends to decrease wild arthropod populations (Attwood et al., 2008, tables 3 and 4; Newbold et al., 2015), and animal products tend to decrease wild terrestrial arthropod populations more than plant-based products due to greater land use for crops per calorie or kg of protein (e.g. Our World in Data, based on Poore & Nemecek, 2018), so shifting towards plant-based would be bad for wild terrestrial arthropods, if they have bad lives or you’re suffering-focused.
However, farmed shrimp/​prawns may use less land than plant-based foods per gram of protein, so maybe shifting away from them would be good by reducing wild terrestrial arthropod populations, too. This is something I’d like to look more into. I imagine land use for shrimp/​prawns is only so low according to these estimates because they’re assuming a high rate of wild aquatic ingredients (whose impacts are morally ambiguous!). You probably can’t get lower land use than tofu per kg of protein by feeding shrimp almost entirely soy and grains, because of higher losses in feed conversion than in soy processing into tofu (and tofu having similar or less land use than other feed ingredients per kg of protein).