What is a Fairy Shrimp anyway?
In a fundamental biological sense, calling it a ‘shrimp’ is just wrong. Common names often apply familiar handles to the unfamiliar (consider ‘seahorse’ or ‘starfish’). Fairy Shrimp are among the most developed invertebrates, namely, the phylum Arthropoda (animals with exoskeletons – shells – and jointed appendages – legs). Fairy Shrimp are a kind of arthropod known as crustacean. All crustaceans have a pair of antennae extending from the forward part of their heads, but that is where the similarity of Fairy Shrimp to true shrimp ends. Crustaceans are one of the major groups of animals that inhabit vernal pools, and are main pillars of their mainly detritus-based food webs. In such a system the bottom level of the food chains is not living plants, but the nutrients present in the mass of fallen leaves, twigs, flowers, bud scales, pollen, fruit, and other plant and animal parts that has accumulated in the vernal pool during the previous autumn and winter and that continues to be added d
