Replication Action objects in heap dump?

I am analyzing some heap dumps from systems that crashed and there are some missing chunks of information regarding what happened that I'm trying to figure out.

My question comes down any hidden meanings of the TransportShardReplicationOperationAction objects showing up in the heap dump. I have seen a large number of these objects piled up in both the EsThreadPoolExecutor and in the TransportService. I had thought these might be suggesting that a node in the system went down/offline and these were caused by the cluster trying to recover. Are there other reasons these objects would be showing up?

These heap dumps are from ES 1.5