Given that juvenile M. latisulcatus rely on burying as a primary mechanism to avoid predators, characteristics of the substrate may play an extremely important role in habitat selection.
Substrates that hinder burying will likely be avoided in preference for those that are easy to bury in.
Thus, areas with very coarse or very fine sediment, or with mats of decaying vegetation overlying the sediment, will probably have lower densities of prawns.
As mentioned above, this may also explain low densities in seagrass areas if the rhizome and root mass of seagrasses prevents burying.
However, while juvenile P. esculentus also bury as a predator avoidance mechanism, they do not seem to show any sediment type preferences (Loneragan et al., 1994; Kenyon et al., 1997), although they do prefer vegetated to unvegetated areas.