When you come up with a possible story idea—kids buying non-native ornamental dwarf shrimp that can become a public nuisance and environmental threat if released into the wild—you then have to come up with a plot. One complication is that the sale and ownership of these non-native shrimp is legal in most states (except Hawaii and Maine, with some restrictions in other states, such as Florida California, and Texas). So, what to do? For Jules Rivera, the solution is to focus on a reseller with a shady background. Of course, we have to assume Rusty knew who sold the shrimp to Robbie and told Mark (in between the panels).

Thus, this story immediately pivots away from a strictly environmental or ecological angle to possible criminal activity that possibly relates to shrimp. The dealer’s “shady activity” will have to relate to the selling or disposing of these non-native shrimp to have any plausible reason for Mark to be involved.

Art Dept. Maybe Mark gets smaller (panel 3) at night due to some kind of long-acting agent that infiltrated his biology over the years of working on dangerous environmental issues and only sleep restores him. Or maybe the nefarious shrimp reseller developed an AI bot that somehow affects the hormones of people who visit his site, causing them to shrink when they view certain web pages. I mean, what else could account for Mark’s scaled-down appearance!?