For what it's worth, and in case anybody's interested, the "shrimp treadmill" was funded by NSF, not USAID, and was exactly the kind of basic science research that the NSF is supposed to fund. Here's an article from 2011 that gives a lot of useful backstory about that story: https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmi...