Between 2023 and 2024, Mr Griffin has been rearing shrimps hatched at nearby WWT Caerlaverock.
In total, 14 survived to adulthood and soon laid their own eggs in the tanks they were reared in.
The sediment in these tanks, containing the eggs, was removed and dried.
In the summers of 2024 and 2025, dried sediment containing more than 20,000 eggs was spread into bare earth of seasonally wet, but at-the-time dry, coastal pools at the RSPB’s Mersehead reserve on the Solway Coast.
The pools are located on coastal grassland behind the dunes, further inland from the area where the previous population was lost in the 1960s.
The pools have since been wetted and dried several times, but this autumn the eggs have finally hatched, more than a year since they were first returned to Mersehead.