Glad You Asked: Utah Has A State Crustacean?
by Jim Davis
Two brine shrimp in hand. Photo courtesy of Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.
In March of 2023, Utah became the seventh and only landlocked state to adopt an official state crustacean—the humble brine shrimp (Artemia franciscana). Additionally, Hawaii has a state shrimp (ʻōpaeʻula) and Missouri a state invertebrate (crayfish), both of which are crustaceans. So, what are crustaceans? They are a large group of mainly aquatic animals with hard shells (exoskeletons), segmented bodies, jointed limbs, and two pairs of antennae. Notable crustaceans included lobsters, shrimp, crabs, barnacles, pill bugs, and of course, brine shrimp. Utah’s state symbol, while primitive for a crustacean, is well qualified for this designation: it is ancient, extraordinarily resilient, a keystone species of the ecosystem, and prospers in its saline aquatic realm.
Brine shrimp are renowned extremophiles and halophiles, meaning they can survive in extreme environments and thrive in water having high salt concentrations. Their resilience allows them to successfully endure an astonishing range of physical and chemical conditions. The crustacean order Anostraca, which includes both brine shrimp and fairy shrimp (freshwater cousins to brine shrimp), has persisted for more than 400 million years. Anostraca has weathered four of Earth’s “Big Five” global extinction events. Its ability to weather difficult times is connected to its highly durable cysts (eggs) that remain in a dormant state of suspended animation called anhydrobiosis (life without water), until favorable conditions return. A single brine shrimp can produce thousands of offspring in her lifetime.
As a demonstration of their resilience to extreme conditions, brine shrimp cysts were famously fixed to the outside of spacecraft and satellites in the 1980s through the 2010s and exposed to long stretches in the vacuum of space, severe temperature swings of several hundred degrees, the absence of both oxygen and water, and zero to microgravity. Once back on Earth, many of these cysts hatched, even after 31 months in outer space. Experiments that shielded cysts from direct ultraviolet and ionizing radiation in space showed almost no drop in cyst viability. Brine shrimp also flew to the Moon twice on Apollo missions in 1972, though they rode inside the spacecraft for this feat. In the laboratory, cysts have remained viable even after exposure to near absolute zero (-459°F) and can survive short periods of water-boiling temperatures (212°F).
Anostraca can be found on all continents in isolated and ephemeral pools and wetlands, desert playas, salt evaporation ponds, coastal lagoons, or any environment that is free of fish. The earliest known fossilized Anostraca (a diminutive and delicate organism that is famously difficult to fossilize) is 365 million years old. The exceptionally well-preserved specimen from Belgium closely resembles modern species and shows that they already had adapted to the extreme environments of ephemeral waters by the Late Devonian Period.
Drawing of a brine shrimp, Popular Science Monthly (1873–1874), Volume 4.
Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp Scientific Classification
Domain: Eukaryota
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Arthropoda
Subphylum: Crustacea
Class: Branchiopoda
Order: Anostraca – sometimes known as fairy shrimp, this order includes both freshwater fairy shrimp and brine shrimp
Family: Artemiidae
Genus: Artemia
Species: A. franciscana – Great Salt Lake brine shrimp, Utah’s official state crustacean
A brine shrimp cyst “slick” on open water in Great Salt Lake’s south arm, measuring hundreds of feet across. Eggs concentrated from winds and currents are located by brine shrimpers, then boats corral the eggs by deploying spill containment booms and then pump them into drainable mesh sacks. The eggs are dried, processed, and packaged for distribution across the globe. Bottom photo courtesy of Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.
As the largest saline lake in the Western Hemisphere, Utah’s Great Salt Lake provides the perfect environment for brine shrimp to thrive, creating a population so large that it is a part of the global economy. Great Salt Lake contributes around 40% to 45% of world market demand for brine shrimp cysts and is the largest sole producer. These cysts are converted to millions of tons of protein-rich seafood. The 2019 to 2020 brine shrimp season (October through January) set a record for biggest catch at 44 million pounds of raw cysts. Most of these are used in the commercial aquaculture industry as highly nutritious food for fry (baby fish), shrimp, prawns, lobster, and crab. They are also used for science as a model organism for toxicity studies and education.
Great Salt Lake brine shrimp (Artemia franciscana) is one of seven to eight formally recognized sexual species of brine shrimp in the world and is one of two or three species native to the Americas. Numbering around 17 trillion (it would take more than half a million years to count them all at one per second) the brine shrimp is vital to Great Salt Lake’s food web. They fuel millions of migratory birds, none more than North America’s eared grebes, that eat 30,000 brine shrimp a day, at a rate of more than one per second for seven hours, while they shed old worn-out feathers and grow new ones. Snowy plovers, American avocets, Wilson’s and red-necked phalaropes, and the California gull (Utah’s State Bird) as well as several species of waterfowl are also heavy consumers. Brine shrimp rely on birds for long-range dispersal in disparate saline water bodies by either clinging to migrating birds or passing through their bodies when consumed and subsequently deposited intact and viable.
Although the brine shrimp genus, Artemia, is likely tens of millions of years old, researchers estimate that it reached its modern form some five to six million years ago during the Messinian Salinity Crisis, when the Mediterranean Sea was physically isolated from the Atlantic Ocean. As a result, the sea repeatedly dried up either partially or almost entirely, precipitating thick layers of salt on the exposed former sea floor. These conditions lasted around six hundred thousand years before the sea was swiftly reclaimed by the Atlantic Ocean during the great Zanclean Flood. By this time, Artemia had adapted to becoming entirely dependent on brine or brackish waters for survival and spread into saline waters on six of the seven continents (only freshwater fairy shrimp are found in Antarctica).
Brine shrimp have inhabited Great Salt Lake and its predecessors for millions of years. Brine shrimp fecal pellets have been identified in sediments from five oil wells drilled in Great Salt Lake between 1978 and 1981, three in the north arm and two in the south. Cores from the wells record five million years of sedimentation and revealed periods of marsh wetlands, and fresh, brackish, and hypersaline open water conditions. Fecal pellets were found in well cuttings in a single sample within the 5- to 3.5-million-year interval of the north arm. In a south arm well, fecal pellets were found within the 3.1- to 2.4-million-year interval, becoming more common across well sediments with the onset of the Ice Age around 2.6 million years ago. By 400,000 thousand years ago, brine shrimp pellets became the most dominant fossil in the sediments, indicating that a hypersaline lake prevailed in the basin, at least periodically, from this time forward.
