How the appearance of a nonnative shrimp in the Chesapeake unearthed a 160-year-old naming mystery
It seemed like such an innocent catch: two peppermint shrimp, netted in the lower Chesapeake Bay during the 2013 Blue Crab Winter Dredge Survey. But their discovery would send Smithsonian biologist Rob Aguilar spiraling down a rabbit hole of century-old field notes, museum fires and World War II bombings. In a new study, Aguilar and SERC’s Fisheries Conservation Lab finally unraveled a taxonomic knot over a century in the making.
Peppermint shrimp, with their translucent shells and candy cane-like stripes, are among the most popular aquarium shrimp in the world. No one knows how many different peppermint shrimp species exist. Part of the problem: Researchers haven’t always been consistent in how they described the shrimp’s features. Color patterns also aren’t well-document for many species. It’s a recipe for confusion when trying to identify a new catch.
Biologists from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science first found the two shrimp. When they brought them to Aguilar’s desk at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), he recognized one of them as the Chesapeake’s native species, Lysmata wurdemanni. But the second immediately struck him as something different.
“We knew it wasn’t wurdemanni,” Aguilar said. “We looked at the morphology. It didn’t match anything that we knew of in the Atlantic.”
It did, however, match another species common in the Indo-Pacific: Lysmata vittata.
DNA sequencing from the National Museum of Natural History seemed to confirm the match. At first. The mystery Chesapeake shrimp matched another Lysmata vittata specimen from Taiwan. But other peppermint shrimp from Brazil and Thailand—also labeled Lysmata vittata—were markedly different.
Thus began Aguilar’s journey to unravel a mystery that started in 1860, with another Smithsonian biologist named William Stimpson.
