While monitoring for invasive species this week with the MIMIC program, I came across a species of shrimp I have not seen in my 4 years of monitoring at this site. The species is Palaemon elegans, the European Rock Shrimp, and is quite different in appearance from our native species of "estuarine" shrimp, Crangon septemspinosa (sand shrimp) and Palaemonetes pugio (grass shrimp). I found 2 adult gravid females in a tide pool on a rocky point surrounded by sand beaches, and many juveniles in the same pool. It was first sighted in New England last summer in Salem Sound (found by Salem Sound Coast Watch volunteers) and we believe this is only the second confirmed sighting of the shrimp in the Gulf of Maine.

Looks like we got a new addition to the intertidal…