Yena Wei
When people talk about the Subphylum Crustacea, most of them only know shrimps, lobsters, and true crabs because they’re common seafood. However, these species all belong to one Class Malacostraca of Crustacea. Most people often ignore the other 11 classes and they also play an important role in the ecosystem and provide food resources for our diet. I want to introduce more about brine shrimp (Artemia salina) under Class Branchiopoda in the subphylum Crustacea. Brine shrimp is the general term for genus Artemia, and its name indicates their habitat and morphology. They live in a high salinity environment. The water for their habitats has very high salt concentration water even 10 times higher than seawater and that’s named “brine” comes from (Pechenik, 2015). In the lab, we observe the preserved tadpole shrimp (Lepidurus) (figure 1) which belong to the same class as brine shrimp and it has a small body size but a distinguishing feature with a pair of compound eyes on its carapace (Encyclopedia of Life, 2022). Compare to these two species, brine shrimp (figure 2) also have stalked compound eyes, which is the major structure to help them get the hight optical sense (Pechenik, 2015). Besides that, they lack a broad carapace and their shape looks similar to shrimp.
Although brine shrimp are too small for people to eat, they play a huge role in the fish industry as a food resource. Besides the general morphology similar to the crustacea, brine shrimp have produced large amounts of eggs named “cysts”, and they are full of nutrients and preserve for a long-time under harsh conditions including desiccation and extreme temperature (Pechenik, 2015). Therefore, young brine shrimp can hatch from these dried eggs after long transportation and become a good food source for fisheries and aquariums (Gao et al., 2017; Britannica, 2021). Low cost, high productivity, easily preserved—all these characteristics make brine shrimp the hidden hero of the aquaculture industry. If they go extinct, the fishing industry will decline and you will lose lots of fish for your diet.
Nowadays, brine shrimp also have more scientific usage in toxicity assays and environmental indicators (Gao et al., 2017; Chan et al., 2021). Scientists want to know the secondary metabolites for chemical defenses across a broad array of marine taxa, and they need an effective model organism to examine the effect of toxicity. Brine shrimps’ quick reactions to toxins and ease of harvest has made them a prime model organism for toxicity assays (Chan et al., 2021). They’re like lab rats in marine studies. After the experiment, the brine shrimp assay is a reasonable and cost-effective method to indicate the compound’s toxicity level to fish, and they will play a more important role in this area (Chan et al., 2021). Furthermore, brine shrimp can be used as an indicator to examine the effect of anthropogenic increasing carbon dioxide emission on marine species (Gao et al., 2017). Scientists found that ocean acidification negatively affects the fatty acid composition and immune system response for the brine shrimp (Gao et al., 2017). We should be aware of that fact because brine shrimp can live in more stressful conditions than their predators and most of the invertebrates (Pechenik, 2015) if they can’t bear the harsh conditions under environmental change, other marine organisms will be more vulnerable in the future. Brine shrimp have small bodies, but they have amazing living abilities and wide applications in our society. In the future, we will have more things to explore about the brine shrimp and study from them.
References
Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica (2021, April 15). brine shrimp. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/animal/brine-shrimp
Chan, Shaughnessy, A. E. P., van den Berg, C. P., Garson, M. J., & Cheney, K. L. (2021). The Validity of Brine Shrimp (Artemia sp.) Toxicity Assays to Assess the Ecological Function of Marine Natural Products. Journal of Chemical Ecology, 47(10-11), 834–846. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10886-021-01264-z
Encyclopedia of Life. Editors of EOL. Lepidurus apus (Linnaeus 1758) Linnaeus 1758. Retrieved March 10, 2022, from https://eol.org/pages/3209874
Gao, Zheng, S., Zheng, C., Shi, Y., Xie, X., Wang, K., & Liu, H. (2018). The immune-related fatty acids are responsive to CO2 driven seawater acidification in a crustacean brine shrimp Artemia sinica. Developmental and Comparative Immunology, 81, 342–347. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dci.2017.12.022
Pechenik. (2015). Biology of the invertebrates (Seventh edition.). McGraw-Hill Education. Valentin, & Oates, A. C. (2013). Opening a can of centipedes: new insights into mechanisms of body segmentation. BMC Biology, 11(1), 116–116. https://doi.org/10.1186/1741-7007-11-116
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