Fairy Shrimp in Canada

bugman

April 23rd, 2010 at 8:20 am

Categories

fresh water daphnia or nymph?
April 22, 2010
Collected April 20 2010
I took the water from a ditch adjacent to several acres of swamp. The waterway was not flowing and lined with fallen winter grass. It was very clean looking water. Not much is growing yet. Spring is early by about three weeks here. I’ve been through a number of pdf files on line and read from a lot of different sites, but there’s been no joy yet.
A short video clip that’s better than most of the images I’ve provided.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkIXo1fI0pY
Thanks for your time in reading this.
Grateful to live in the wild
Southern Manitoba Canada

Fairy Shrimp

Dear Grateful,
Daphnia are Crustaceans, a subphylum of the Arthropods, hence they are distant relatives of insects. Your creature is a different freshwater crustacean, a Fairy Shrimp. Fairy Shrimp have unusual life cycles similar to that of Brine Shrimp. Fairy Shrimp live in temporary vernal ponds and they lay eggs which need to dry out when the water evaporates. In Canada, the eggs pass the winter under the snow in the dried mud, and when the spring thaw produces ponds, the eggs hatch and the young quickly develop, needing to mate before the ponds dry out again.We just posted our own photos of Fairy Shrimp we discovered in Rio de los Angeles State Park in our Cypress Park Neighborhood of Los Angeles. We are currently researching our Southern California species of Fairy Shrimp which may be endangered due to habitat loss. The more mild southern California climate does not have a freeze, and winter rains produce the vernal ponds that host the populations of Fairy Shrimp.