We’ve followed this shrimp through almost its entire life — the slow growth, the change of sex, the nightly climb through the dark, the shell it sheds to get bigger. But we skipped the very beginning. And the beginning is the strangest part of all: before this shrimp was ever a shrimp on the seabed, it spent months adrift in open water, at the mercy of the currents, in a form you wouldn’t even recognise.
Let me take you back to the start.
It begins when the eggs hatch, in spring or early summer. But what emerges isn’t a tiny shrimp. It’s a larva — a transparent, spiny, alien-looking speck, utterly unlike the adult it will become. If you saw one, you’d never guess what it turns into. And this larva doesn’t sink to the bottom to begin its life. It goes up, into the water column, and joins the plankton.
Then it drifts.
For two to three months, the young shrimp lives suspended in open water, carried by ocean currents, with no real say in where it’s going. During that time it passes through a series of stages — five larval phases, moulting every week or two, slowly building the body it will eventually need on the seabed. It’s already shedding its shell to grow, right from the first weeks of life, long before it has any armour worth the name.
And here’s the part that reframes the whole life cycle.
Because the larva drifts rather than swims, the currents decide where it ends up. Not the parents. Not the larva itself. The ocean simply carries this generation wherever the water happens to flow — sometimes settling it close to where it hatched, sometimes sweeping it hundreds of kilometres away to another stretch of coast entirely. Where the next generation of shrimp will live is, quite literally, decided by the sea during those drifting months.
Only after all of that — after the drifting, the moulting, the slow assembly of a body — does the young shrimp finally settle. It sinks to the seabed as a post-larva, takes up the bottom-dwelling life we associate with it, and begins the long, slow years of growing up in cold water that we’ve talked about before.
So every cold-water shrimp has a hidden chapter, one that happened before anything else we know about it.
Before it grew slowly for years. Before it lived as a male and became a female. Before it climbed through the dark each night, or shed its armour, or reached the size that put it on a plate — it was a tiny, unrecognisable drifter, floating in the open sea for months, going wherever the current took it.
It didn’t choose where its life would happen. The ocean chose for it.
And then, having survived the most dangerous, least certain part of the whole journey, it settled down to the slow business of becoming the shrimp we know.
