Fairy Shrimp | Nature Adventure

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Biology

When you think of shrimp, you might picture those pink curved crustaceans that you eat at the restaurant. While they might be related, they are not the same. In fact, the shrimp you normally see at the store live in salty ocean water. You won't find tadpole shrimp out there!

Tadpole and fairy shrimp live in freshwater. They are very popular in playa lakes just as the one shown on this page. Their eggs can withstand extreme temperatures. Ranging from freezing cold to boiling temperatures, fairy and tadpole shrimp eggs can stay dormant for up to years! This means that they don't have to hatch right away. They have even managed to adapt in a way that allows these shrimp eggs to know if there is not enough water to grow.

Sometimes there are scattered rains in the desert, but if the watert that accumulates on the ground is not enough for them to grow into adult shrimp, then they will stay hidden in the ground. They live very short lives but are a food source to many animals including insects, toads, and ducks.

It is important to understand what helps these organisms grow and what is bad for them because many animals depend on them as a food source. Without small organisms like fairy and tadpole shrimp, other animals like tadpoles and desert birds, would not have enough food to eat.

Ecological Importance

The desert is a hot and dry place to live. Many animals that live in the desert have adapted to this climate. This means they have found ways to survive in extreme heat. All life needs water to survive and even in a place where it hardly rains, animals have found a way to survive.

Dry lake beds are also known as playa lakes. They are areas of sunken in ground where water may accumulate if given the chance. These lakes are very important to the animals and plants in the desert because they hold something that is very important for survival. The water in these lakes usually evaporates in the heat of the desert. When the water evaporates, it leaves behind lots of minerals and nutrients. It also leaves behind many tiny eggs.

These eggs belong to the fairy, tadpole, and clam shrimp that lived in the lake before it dried up. For months and sometimes years, these eggs were waiting for water to fill the lake bed again so that they could hatch and grow.

Sometimes these playa lakes dry up and never get filled again, but when they do see rain again, they begin to fill with these fresh water shrimps that attract more animals and so an oasis in the desert is formed.

Did you know?

Fairy shrimp have been around longer than fishes have existed!

Fossils of fairy shrimp relatives have been found dating back all the way to the Cambrian period, over 500 million years ago. And their bodies haven't really changed much since then; they have a simple but refined system for survival, a body-plan that works for what they need it to do, and have clearly had a lot of success with that, having survived all the way to the modern age! Sometimes, evolution finds a niche and doesn't need to change much to keep it.

Like other animals we call modern-day fossils, we might be tempted to say that they're primitive, un-evolved - like that's a bad thing! But really, they are just very, very good at what they do.

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