I remember seeing a documentary a while back about a kind of shrimp-like crustacean that lived in ephemeral pools in a desert location; the entire life cycle would be completed in the very short wet period once every few years or more - the eggs were packaged in such a way that they could survive for extended periods without water. The documentary also claimed the eggs were able to survive being boiled and that it was not uncommon for campers and hikers to find live shrimps hatching out in their kettle in the morning, having boiled it the night before and left it to cool.
Thing is, I’m pretty sure these weren’t Sea Monkeys (Artemia) - they were bigger - it was hard to be sure, but I think the eggs were maybe 2-3mm in diameter and the adult shrimps perhaps an inch long.
Can anybody help me find out more about these things? I’ve tried googling, but the net is suffering from Sea Monkey overload.
Do you remember which particular desert the documentary was about? I’ve seen a couple with shrimp in them, one on the Sahara, and one on Australia. There’s a bunch of different species of desert crustacean that live in ephemeral pools. For example, here’s the Australian shield shrimp, which looks rather like a trilobite.
The desert environment was somewhere in America, IIRC, in particular, the ponds were smallish circular holes in the ground. Searching around a bit, I think the animal in question might have been Triops (which looks very similar to the Australian shrimp you mentioned).
Google on Triops. We found a temporary pool outside of Riyadh a few months ago that was just crammed with these things. They are hardy as hell, capable of reproducing in a variety of ways, living fossils, etc. They are at least 120 million years old.
I understand they are rare in some parts of the world but they seem to be doing well in Saudi.
If you find some you can feed them yeast.
Regards
I’d say it was Triops or something very similar to it (looks like most places in the world have some sort of similar crustacean that inhabits ephemeral pools. I was actually quite surprised that we even have them here in the UK, although recorded in only one location (which, as it happens, is not far from the place where I live).
Having recently read Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life, I happened to notice that there are some fossils from the Burgess Shales that bear striking resemblance to modern-day Triops - indeed, as the linked page states, the phenotype for this group is quite static.
Now, I’m sure that a great deal of that has to do with ‘whatever works’ being preserved because it works well, but I did start wondering if the reproductive strategies of these ephemeral crustaceans could be partly responsible for the preservation of form.
Apparently, it is thought that the eggs can remain dormant for centuries in the right conditions (for Triops, they apparently need to dry out, then get wet again, but if they find themselves in a larger body of water that seldom dries out completely, they’ll just sit there in the ooze indefinitely).
This means that, when exceptional conditions do cause the large body of water to dry out, the shrimps that hatch out next wet season include the progeny of a generation long past - possibly reintroducing traits that may have been lost in more recent generations.
Or in other words, the gene pool for these creatures is not only distributed geographically, but also temporally.
Could this have been a stabilising factor in the evolution of these animals?
