Jessica Gullett
PEER Article – Revised Dr aft 2
1
Shrimp on a Treadmill
On his June 6, 2011 news and commentary show, former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee
lit into Congress for wasting money in sponsoring research on “how shrimp function on a treadmill.”
This “wasteful” science is the work of Dr. Louis Burnett, professor of biology at the Grice Marine Lab at
the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Huckabee’s indignant exposé of taxpayers’ dollars
squandered on screwball scientific research created the perfect storm for politics and science to collide,
and they did so on a very public stage.
But did Mike Huckabee attack Burnett’s work without the essential facts?
Burnett’s research focuses on how changes in the environment and pathogens affect marine
organisms. A necessary component of this work is assuring that the organisms he studies in his lab are
exposed to the same environmental conditions that they would face if they were in their natural
habitats. Shrimp and crabs are extremely active in their natural settings, but they are lazy in the lab.
Burnett needed to find a way to increase the metabolic rates of these animals in captivity. His solution?
Shrimp on a treadmill.
Burnett fabricated a transparent acrylic glass chamber resembling an aquarium. He then placed
a conveyer belt, or treadmill, at the bottom and added a respirometer to measure oxygen uptake by the
shrimp – or crabs or whatever organism he wanted to study.
What was intended to be a scientific solution for a problem in experimental design quickly
became a media sensation.
Any YouTube search for “shrimp on a treadmill” yields approximately 52 different versions of
shrimp running to various songs including “The Final Countdown” and the theme song to Rocky.
