Abstract

The Great Salt Lake, with its saline content approaching saturation, presents a hostile environmnent to most living organisms, both within the water and upon the niearby shores. Those who would survive the rigors of this aquatic desert must either be equipped to meet the exactions imposed or to avoid them. The problem of meeting the peculiarities of the environment is largely physiological-that of extracting moisture from a salt solution. This problem varies not only from time to time with the rise and fall of the lake level and its consequent dilution and concentration but also from place to place wlhere dilution occurs by the inpouring of fresh-water streamns and underground seepage. The paucity of life forms actually living within the lake water is undoubtedly due to these severe restrictions. The principal food-makers of the lake are blue-green algae including several colonial forms of the genus Aphanothece which produce salmon colored gelatin-like masses, especially near shore, diatoms of the genera Navicula and Cymbella, two flagellates of the genus Chlamydolonas, and several others of lesser importance. These are undoubtedly the food base for a very limited fauna of protozoans and invertebrates which can withstand immersion in the water of the lake. A rhizopod of the genus Ainoeba and a ciliate of the genus Uroleptus are reported to occur, undoubtedly in vasL numbers although invisible to the eye. Of the visible forms, the brine shrimp, Artemia gracilis Verrill, and two brine flies, Ephydra gracilis Packard and Ephydra hians Say are common inhabitants of the lake. So far as known, no parasites have been able to follow them into the brine. Freed from parasites, these arthropods have been enabled to multiply with little or no molestation to the limit of the food supply,

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