Where is the heart of a shrimp?

The heart of a shrimp is in its head, more precisely in the cephalothorax—the fused head-and-thorax region beneath the hard carapace.

This placement sounds strange because vertebrate hearts are usually associated with the chest. In shrimp, however, the cephalothorax contains many major organs, including the brain, stomach, digestive gland, gills, and heart. The heart lies dorsally, toward the back of this region, just ahead of the segmented abdomen.

Shrimp also have an open circulatory system. Their heart draws in hemolymph through small openings called ostia and pumps it through arteries before it bathes tissues in the body cavity. Their oxygen-carrying pigment is hemocyanin, which uses copper rather than iron and can give oxygenated hemolymph a bluish color.

The answer “head” is the standard quiz wording, although “cephalothorax” is the more anatomically precise term. The shrimp’s tail is its abdomen, so the heart is not located in the portion most people think of as the body or tail.