ABSTRACT. – Winter storms can put the upper millimeters of the seabed into motion. Small invertebrates in these layers could allow themselves to be suspended or burrow to avoid it, depending on the cost-benefit balance between spending a storm in a deeper layer of the sediment and spending it in the water column. At 18 m depth in the northern Gulf of Mexico (29o40.63’N, 84o22.80’W), both males and females of many harpacticoid copepod species allowed themselves to be suspended, but the males of some species burrowed. Subsequent study revealed that one of the nominal species with burrowing males subsumed two new species. Because storminduced erosion potentially has large influences on meiobenthic community structure, and information on species’ responses to it is so limited, we analyzed the data for the two new species. The females of neither burrowed in response to an erosion rate that would occur in winter storms. The males of Protopsammotopa tipperi did, but the results are not clear for the males of Actopsyllus matthewi.