4. Shrimp in the Grass

As I (Anne) paddled a kayak out from shore into the sea grass meadows of St. Joe Bay in the Florida Panhandle, it was a warm summer morning. A bald eagle was a pinpoint in the blue forever overhead. As always with eagles, it was so high that it took me a while to be sure it really was an eagle and not an osprey. A marine biologist, I had studied and taught university students about the sea grass ecosystem for many years, but today I was in search of a mysid shrimp that was so small it was nearly invisible as a baby and hardly any bigger as an adult.

The goal was to begin a scientific shrimp farm. The species was used to test the toxicity of oil drilling effluent. In order to get a permit to dump their waste from offshore ...

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