Thanks to Shrimp, These Waters Stay Fresh and Clean | Short Film Showcase

[Music] The first time I saw it, I couldn't believe it. I mean, it was like the Fawn; it was completely different than anything I'd seen before. When you get eight or ten species all in a small pool still coexisting, and they're all shrimp or crabs, it's like, well, how do they do that? How do they split up the resources? How do they share things?

So they all have their job: feeding, they're filter feeding, they're taking particles out of the water, they're picking on all of the things that they can feed on. So there are all these things that process organic material, especially leaf litter, and there's a lot of it every day. In some months, an enormous amount, and certainly after hurricanes, huge amounts of wood are coming in to feed the food web.

And it works, and it's been really resilient. If you put out a trap in one of the ways that we sample our shrimp, and you pull it up and you see hundreds, literally hundreds, in each trap, people's eyes light up and say, "Oh my goodness!" You know, like, that's a lot of shrimp. Yeah, and they're doing a lot of work.

The kinds of places where the shrimp like to be are exactly the same places where the people like to be. The reason that they like the same places is that our shrimp do, that the shrimp are keeping it clean, and they're sweeping off the sediment from the bottom. They're turning a lot of that material into their own bodies, and the shrimp are able to use a lot of things that would otherwise pile up and be kind of slimy and not very attractive to swimmers.

So all that sweeping and all that movement that they do is really keeping things great for [Music] recreation. These shrimp do clean up the water; they're filter feeding out a lot of organic material and turning it into shrimp, which turns into fish food and various other kinds of things within the food web.

And they're working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, at no cost to Puerto [Music] Rico. In order for this system to work in the mountains and for water quality to be available and clean to the public outside the forest, outside the mountains, we really have to have connectivity. We have to have a really good way for shrimp to migrate upstream and downstream; same with the fishes, same with the snails.

When you start planting, you know, where do you divert the water? Do you have a dam in the channel or a reservoir off channel? Those are important decisions for maintaining these species. So we're hoping that more and more people appreciate what is living in the river and start to think about, well, how can we keep it that way? Because it does provide a lot of important ecosystem services, as we call it. [Music]