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This is episode 3 of the 4 part “Fascination” about Vernal Pool. You can listen to Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
transcript
Christopher Carved: this is Scientific Americanof science, quickI am Christopher Interriata. It’s almost every kid’s dream, at least mine…
Adam Wall: Welcome, Christopher, behind the scenes at Crustacean.
Engraved: …you are in a natural history museum and the scientists working there behind the scenes”
wall: This is not part of what the general public sees.
Engraved: Well, a childhood dream came true on a recent evening when Adam Wall, the crustacean collection manager, took me to the vaults of the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.
wall: We consider this room to be an incredible value.
Engraved: These collections are part of a museum that lurks in the shadows of vast amounts. T Rex and Triceratops A less charismatic part than a stuffed elephant or lion.It’s a vast biological library—shelf upon shelf, tens of millions of specimens no On public display.
wall: There are things like coconut crabs. We have these totally alien looking rabbit ear barnacles, then acorn barnacles, which are really traditional hard looking ones…and also you have little chunks of whale skin.. The barnacles are attached.
Engraved: And then there are the fairy shrimps too. mad max– Level ability to withstand drought and fire and suddenly come back to life.Adam has lot here of them.
wall: See the arguably the world’s largest endangered fairy shrimp.
Engraved: This is a very precious thing. He says that this room alone has him insured for $600 million. It’s also built to last, with special lights and electrical switches.
wall:This is a setup very similar to what you would find in an oil refinery or similar. That’s because there are hundreds of thousands of gallons of 95% ethanol in this room that we use to store our specimens.
Engraved: Ethanol is also highly flammable.
wall: In this room, if an earthquake happens, I don’t want sparks to fly.
Engraved: He spins a large wheel on the side of the shelf to pull it apart.
wall: It’s from your local library and allows you to fit more books into a small space…
Engraved: …and reveal a tower of fairy shrimp samples.
The shelves are twice as tall as mine, and the refrigerator door is jam-packed with jars labeled like condiments.
wall: This particular specimen is from San Diego County, Branchinecta lindahli….and represent the whole community as one jar. This is from Proctor Valley, California, San Diego County, USA….and it gives you the exact size of the net mesh. that it was collected.
Engraved (tape): cool. So it’s like a snapshot of a moment in a very specific place.
wall: That’s right.. And we are very happy to be the storage location for Vernalpool Fairy Shrimp in Southern California.
Engraved (tape): But you look like you’re running out of room.
wall: don’t talk about it All collection managers at this location are running out of rooms. I have to move everything around to make some more space, especially for the fairy shrimp.
Engraved: The reason museums need to make room for these fairy shrimp samples is much the same reason museums need to make room for every sample. It is to preserve these relics of the , so that future scientists can answer questions that we do not yet know we need to ask.
wall: Getting these snapshots of biodiversity over time is very important.
Engraved: That’s why this collection is so valuable. For example, they have previously collected crabs on Pacific atolls. and After nuclear tests in the 1940s and 1950s. No one will be able to re-sample pre-explosion crabs.
wall: It’s a time machine that allows you to go to places that don’t exist or to ecosystems that have been destroyed, making it very convenient to see the biodiversity that exists in Madagascar. Instead of getting on a plane and dealing with the hassles of traveling abroad, look around and see it.
Engraved: And in the case of spring ponds, so many have already been destroyed that the jars on the shelf here may be the only record of the biodiversity that once existed in a particular pond. just waiting for someone to discover it.
But all these jars aside, Adam had I promised to show you the real thing by e-mail. live Fairy shrimp too.
[CLIP: Museum hallway ambiance]
Engraved: There, you’ll return through a maze of corridors, galleries, and atriums to his lab on the other side of the museum…
wall: Take this… stairs. This is part of the original… museum and the Grand Rotunda.
Engraved: The rotunda is absolutely stunning. Marble pillars and walls, stained-glass skylights overhead, and central bronze statues of Her Three Goddesses of Art, History, and Science, holding glowing orbs. It’s so cool.
wall: But anyway…
[CLIP: Lab ambiance]
Engraved: Back in Adam’s lab, still more A vial on one of the lab benches — a sample sent to the museum by a field researcher. Remember when he ran out of space in the Collection Vault?
He grabs one of the vials and takes a closer look.
wall: that’s really cool. This is actually a dormant egg of that species..when this sample is exposed to rain water and the right conditions..it mimics the right time to hatch in a pool of that part.the world….actually , you can get baby fairy shrimp in 24 hours…
Engraved: Luckily, he’s already thinking ahead.
wall: Want to see baby fairy shrimp that just hatched an hour or so ago?
Engraved (tape): Sounds fun. have understood.
wall: i know baby…
Engraved: In another room, he showed me a large glass bottle illuminated by a flashlight. Full of small specks.
wall: If you see something moving now, it’s a larva, and as a larva it’s phototactic, so focus around this light…
Engraved (tape): Oh my God.. looks like there are some ‘them’ out there.
wall: And there it is. It’s like doing a crazy barrel roll or something. Hmm, yeah. i love these things they are crazy.
Engraved: You can’t really see it unless you zoom in, but he has a microscope on another bench.
wall: This is the Ferrari of microscopes. It’s like a $40,000 dissecting scope….I think we cried a little bit when we finally got it.
Engraved: On the video screen, four baby pixie prawns are flying around and circling around them.
wall: The only real appendages are the antennae, but they actually use them to move around and swim like that..these totally look like 1980s spaceship video games increase.
Engraved: he is right They look like Atari’s Space Invaders.
[CLIP: Space Invaders theme]
Engraved: In case it wasn’t already clear, these fairy shrimp are small but really powerful.
Shannon Blair: They lived through the collapse of Pangea. They have survived his KT extinction. They survived the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Engraved: In the next episode, we talk to scientists like Shannon Blair about the one thing these hardcore survivors are being tested for resilience: human development.
science, quick Produced by Jeff Dervicio, Turika Bose and Kelso Harper. Music by Dominic Smith.
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for science, quick— Christopher Kaved.
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