In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal shortened the route between Europe and India, accelerated human and goods mobility and facilitated colonization of Africa. Social science scholarship on the canal has primarily focused on human histories and politics. An unforeseen non-human process with far-reaching effects has fallen out of view. With the breaking the biogeographic barriers that isolated the biotas of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, a free-flowing water passageway between the distant seas was created. Soon, marine creatures tried this route. So far, more than 300 species have moved northward and settled in the Mediterranean, e.g. the puffer-fish Lagocephalus sceleratus, the Rhopilema nomadica jellyfish, the Scarus ghobban parrot-fish, prawns and crabs. The phenomenon is called Lessepsian migration. Only a handful of species have moved the other way. The Mediterranean’s favorable living conditions (higher nutrition and lower salinity) explains this mono-directionality. Adapted to the harsher conditions, tropical Lessepsian species thrive in their new habitats. With the 2015 widening of the canal and global warming, Lessepsian populations have proliferated significantly, and the newcomers outcompete native species, take over ecosystems and damage fisheries and tourism. But if these ‘bad’ species have been hypervisualized” (Amar 2013) in scientific and public discourse, it should be noted that Lessepsian species are fished and eaten: they constitute one fifth of Egypt’s Mediterranean catch. Despite these migrants’ significant impact on Mediterranean (human as well as cross-species) cultures, Lessepsian migration has primarily been an object of study for biologists. Yet, while a process in nature, Lessepsian migration is not a process of nature only. Taking its name from Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Frenchman who oversaw the canal-construction, it is a result of imperial intervention in nature and the directly joining of two distant seas, unparalleled in history. This presentation outlines my new anthropological project on this unruly afterlife of the Suez Canal. The project advances a more-than-human angle to Middle Eastern anthropology, and provides a distinctly human perspective to what has long been a natural science topic. In this presentation, I focus on how Lessepsian migration can be approached as ‘imperial debris’ (Stoler 2008) as a way of analytically tracing the afterlife of empire in human lives and environments. Through Stoler’s concept, I show how this marine creature mobility is not as an ecological phenomenon only, but a remain from the past that now returns with unintended effects on landscapes, human and non-human socialities and ecosystems.