Shrimpus eBayicus

By Bob Grant Shrimpus eBayicus Lebbeus clarehanna, the new shrimp species named by NBA star Luc Longley and discovered by grad student Anna McCallum on a research cruise funded by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. Courtesy of CSIRO, Australia Anna McCallum started her scientific career with the type of discovery that some biologists spend their entire careers chasing. In 2005, after earning

Written byBob Grant

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Anna McCallum started her scientific career with the type of discovery that some biologists spend their entire careers chasing. In 2005, after earning an undergraduate degree, she worked as an assistant aboard the research vessel Southern Surveyor and discovered a new species of shrimp in the deep waters off the southwest coast of Australia. During the cruise, nets trawled the ocean depths from 100–1000 meters, dumping their catch on board for McCallum and her colleagues to sift through. “We found a lot of new species, not all as spectacular as the little shrimp,” McCallum recalls. (Indeed, McCallum says she was so busy sorting samples during her 3:00 PM–3:00 AM shifts, that she doesn’t even remember collecting it.) Finding and identifying the spotty, 5-centimeter-long shrimp was an opportunity to immortalize herself or a close colleague through naming the new species.

But McCallum, now a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, ...

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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