The results on the shear force, toughness and cohesiveness of the two prawn species was applied to multivariate ANOVA (Zar, 1999) using the storage time and dose of irradiation as explanatory variables. For individual species, a post hoc Tukey test was used to highlight the significant variations among the levels of storage and the doses, if any. Prior to use in the MANOVA, the data were subjected to Levene's test to estimate the homogeneity of variance. All the analyses were carried out in SPSS ver 10 (Kinnear & Gray, 2000) following Zar (1999). The microbial data were subjected to Least Significant Difference (LSD) test (p 0.05) following Gacula, and Singh (1984).