 |
| Male E. vernalis by Leo Kenney |
Fairy shrimp are wonderful,
interesting, beautiful – pick your gushing demonstratives, they’re
just neat. They are vernal pool dependent and have a life cycle that
is pretty impressive; they go ahead and die to get through the dry
period.
Fairy shrimp are
relatively large (about an inch and a half), slow-moving, and rather
easy to detect if they happen to be present in a vernal pool. There
aren’t many species of fairy shrimp in any given region. In
Massachusetts, we’re sure there are two, the common Eubranchipus vernalis, and the uncommon Eubranchipus intricatus (it’s possible that
there’s one or maybe even two others). They aren’t difficult to
tell apart if you know what you’re looking at, but it turns out
that very few people actually know what they’re looking at when it
comes to fairy shrimp.
Fairy shrimp
are fairly ubiquitous on the landscape; wherever you find vernal
pools, you have a pretty good chance of turning up fairies in the
early spring. However, E. intricatus is rare, known from very few sites –
around the year 2000, only 7 localities in the state were known. It's a state listed Species of Special Concern.
So that brings us to the topic at hand.
Back around 2002 the Vernal Pool Association decided that we should
find out if the rare fairy shrimp is actually rare by doing a lot of
sampling around the state and identifying what we found. Since we’re
small and few, we thought it’d be a great idea to invite “citizen
scientists” to collect fairy shrimp from pools they knew and send
them to us. If we received samples from lots of folks from all over
the state, we’d have a pretty good chance of finding out if the
Intricate Fairy Shrimp (our rare one) is actually rare, or if it’s
just been suffering from under-reporting because no one ever knows
what species they’re looking at.
Fast forward to 2013. A fairly large
collection of vials has been rattling around three different offices
for nearly 10 years, the unfortunate result of not being a high
priority for anyone for a long time. I recently took a substantial
chunk of time and effort to go through the entire collection, confirm
IDs, re-label, reunite location data with samples, and turn all of
that citizen science effort into actual scientific data.
Here are the results of note:
15 observers sent us samples from:
90 different sites in:
30 different towns throughout
Massachusetts.
Our common fairy shrimp, Eubranchipus
vernalis, was found in 78 vernal pools
Our state-listed fairy shrimp,
Eubranchipus intricatus, was found in 12.
So the data took a long time to sort
out, mainly because life can have a way of getting in the way. But we
came up with some great information, and confirmation that that state
listing is pretty valid. Our Citizen Scientists have more than
doubled the number of known locations, from 7 to 19, and helped
create a pretty incredible collection that will live at the Harvard
Museum of Comparative Zoology. Maybe someday it will play a roll in
someone’s Ph.D. Thesis or help us better understand why one of
these species is so much more common than the other.
Interested in participating in the
survey? We’d love to get it going again. Get in touch with the
Vernal Pool Association at www.vernalpool.org
and we’ll get you geared up!
~ MRB 7/25/13
