Burrowing shrimp are terrible neighbours for oysters — and their moving burrows end up planting eelgrass

On Washington's Willapa Bay, burrowing shrimp churn the mudflats, burying the oysters and clams that shellfish growers tend. University of Washington researchers tracked the shrimp beds for three years and found something no one had measured: the beds themselves migrate, up to 100 feet (30 metres) a year. Stranger still is what they leave behind. Sediment the shrimp have worked becomes finer and firmer once they move on — and after several years, those abandoned beds are colonised by eelgrass, a foundation species and a marker of a healthy estuary. The pest, it turns out, is also an accidental gardener. The study appears in Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science.

SDG 14 · Life below water