Brine Shrimp in SF Bay

Jun 17, 2016 • 1:30 PM UTC

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damontighe

I currently work as a Curriculum and Training Specialist at Bio-Rad laboratories and help teachers incorporate more biotechnology into their classroom. I worked in DNA sequencing for years including the Human Genome Project and single cell genomics (termite, cow, and other guts). I have a love of the outdoors that I spread to the public via Calnature.org. I enjoy backpacking, picking mushrooms and photography.

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On my way back from helping a high school in Menlo Park with SDS-PAGE gel imaging I stopped off at Bedwell Bay Front Park to check out some of the salt ponds.

The super salty ponds didn’t have any obvious signs of life but I did find a pond with a great green shimmer to it and brine shrimp, which I’m familiar with seeing at high elevation in the Sierras but this was the first time I’d actually seen them in the SF Bay.

I unfortunately didn’t have my foldscope on me and was rushing to get back to a meeting, so scooped up a shrimp and took it home so that later I could get a close look at how it propels itself. The image below is the tip of the feeding and swimming appendages from the center of the body:

What material are these “oars” made out of? How does depth beneath the flesh relate to length and what can this tell us about the strength of the material?
Here is a an image of the eye

Why is it dark? Why is the edge of it compartmentalized and does it act more similar to an insect compound eye then one of ours? What are the dark granules to the right of the main dark area?
How to find brine shrimp: I tend to find them in areas where there are small bodies of water not inhabitanted by fish and primarily in the warm summer months.
How these images were taken: I used a glass side with coverslip (precarious) over the brine shrimp with my foldscope held up perpendicular to a desk lamp with an iphone6 attached via the Foldscope magnet system. I then moved the foldscope back and forth by the lamp until I reached a contrast that I liked and took still frames.
iNaturalist: www.inaturalist.org/observations/3463103