The bloody red shrimp, a tiny species native to the Black Sea of eastern Europe and western Asia, has been found in Pennsylvania for the first time.

Students from Penn State Behrend recently caught one of the shrimp – Hemimysis anomala – in the water of Lake Erie at Lampe Marina in Erie.

The non-native shrimp was first found in Lake Ontario in 2006. It’s thought that the shrimp was carried there in the ballast water in a freighter.

Within a year it had spread to Oneida and Seneca lakes in New York. Since then it also has been found in the waters of Lake Erie in New York and Ohio.

It was assumed the shrimp was in Pennsylvania’s portion of Lake Erie, but had not been confirmed there until students Kyle Deloe, a senior from Knox; Noel Moore, a sophomore from Lock Haven; and Emily Dobry, a graduate student from Erie; found it while working with water from Lake Erie to test the use of environmental DNA for detecting invasive species.

“It’s traces of DNA, basically, like what you might find at a crime scene,” said Ivor Knight, associate dean for research and graduate studies and a professor of biology at Penn State Behrend. “Hemimysis are small — maybe 2 or 3 mm long — and their bodies are mostly clear, so it isn’t easy to see them in the water. Testing for eDNA could provide evidence that the shrimp are or recently had been in a sample of water.”

Knight and Matthew Gruwell, associate professor of biology, won a $177,000 grant from the Great Lakes Protection Fund to study the effectiveness of eDNA in detecting invasive species. They hope to develop a method of quickly testing ballast water in ships that enter lakes that are not yet contaminated.

With help from the student researchers, they set up 24 10-gallon fish tanks and added Hemimysis DNA. In half of the tanks, they added actual shrimp. In the other tanks, they added a slurry — water that had included shrimp, which had since been removed. That allowed them to test how long Hemimysis DNA remains in the water after the shrimp are gone.

As part of the work, the students dropped a net into the water at Lampe Marina. When they pulled it up, they saw a swarm of Hemimysis.

“In the light from the red headlamp, their eyes glow, like little taillights in the water,” Dobry said. “You can’t see their bodies, but you see their eyes. We knew immediately that we’d found them.”

Knight took a sample of the shrimp to James Grazio, a Great Lakes biologist with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, who confirmed the identification.

DEP biologists had searched for Hemimysis in Pennsylvania’s portion of Lake Erie, including at Lampe Marina. The students tried a different approach, waiting until later at night.

A month after their first discovery, the students dropped their net again and found even more shrimp.

It isn’t yet clear how Hemimysis will affect the ecosystem in Lake Erie. In Europe, the shrimp have reduced the algal and zooplankton biomass in lakes and reservoirs, altering the feeding patterns of larger species, including fish. The overall risk posed by the species is “high,” according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Dobry explained, “People see these and think, they’re so tiny, they can’t be a threat. The truth is, we just don’t know yet. But if you love where you live and you want to protect it, you need to know what’s out there.”

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