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Oh, graceful is the fairy shrimp! To interest you he cannot fail. He swims about upon his back. His feet, like feathered paddles, flail The water as his colors flash In sunlight, delicate and pale.
SMALL ponds which gradually dry up as warm weather comes are the best places to find fairy shrimp. Sometimes the water seems to be crowded with them. As soon as you see them, you will know that they are not insects. They are more closely related to crayfish than most other water animals that you know.
As you watch these beautiful little animals swim in your aquarium, you may be surprised to find that they always swim on
their backs. They are almost transparent in appearance and variously colored. Some of their colors are red, green, orange, or brownish red. Those most commonly found are about one inch in length, although there is a Giant Fairy Shrimp found in alkaline pools in the Grand Coulee which is over three inches long.
You can see that each fairy shrimp has a head and a rather strange body. Part of this body is so long and slender that it looks like a tail. It is divided into many segments. There are many pairs of feet attached to the forward end of the fairy shrimp's body. Perhaps that is why he is such a graceful swimmer. His leaf-like feet make good paddles. They carry the gills, so they are sometimes called "gill feet."
A fairy shrimp "chews" his food by crushing it between the bases (the body ends) of his feet. As the chewing gill feet move, they carry the crushed food to the fairy shrimp's mouth.
Some female fairy shrimp carry their eggs in a pouch attached to the body back
of the last pair of legs. (You can see such a pouch in the photograph which illustrates this chapter.) These eggs drop to the bottom of the pond and stay there when it dries up in summer.
The fairy shrimp shown here were found in a small pond in early April. The pond was about twenty feet in diameter and about two feet deep in the center. By the middle of May the pond had dried completely and was the summer home of beetles, ants, grasshoppers, and other insects. The eggs
of the fairy shrimp lay buried in the dried mud, waiting for the spring rains to fill the pond again.
You may not find these little animals in the same pond every year. Sometimes it is several years before conditions appear to be just right for the eggs to hatch.
Many beetles, bugs, and other water insects will feed upon fairy shrimp, so it is best to keep them in separate aquaria. If you have plants in your aquarium to keep the water fresh, fairy shrimp will find their own food and stay alive many days. They eat tiny plants and animals which they find in the water.
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