A new species of freshwater shrimp has been named after the rural Nevada county it calls home, but this cave critter will never see the light of day.
After all, Stygobromus albapinus doesn't have any eyes.
The tiny, colorless crustacean was first discovered deep underground in November 2008 by two adventurous staff members at Great Basin National Park, 300 miles northeast of Las Vegas in White Pine County.
It officially became a new species earlier this year when a pair of researchers named the creature and described its features in the scientific journal Subterranean Biology.
The species name albapinus literally means white pine in Latin, but the shrimp's known range is decidedly more specific than that. It has been found only in one 200-yard stretch of a single cave at the eastern edge of White Pine County.
"It takes about an hour of crawling and belly crawling through mud to get to it," said park ecologist Gretchen Baker, who first stumbled across the shrimp during a research trip into Model Cave.
Baker and Ben Roberts were on their way out of the narrow limestone tunnel when they spotted the tiny shrimp in a puddle of seeping groundwater about a half mile from the entrance.
They missed it on the way in because the puddle was a lot smaller, said Roberts, who serves as the park's natural resources program manager.
"It's shown us that the diversity of the park is something we're continuing to understand and that it's important to protect the habitat both above ground and below ground," Baker said. "It makes me want to keep on searching and see what else is out there."
A tiny discovery
The shrimp is the eighth new species discovered at Great Basin National Park since 1999 and the sixth that is thought to exist nowhere else in the world.
Confirming such things can be painstaking, but it never gets old, Roberts said.
"I honestly think that every one of them is amazing," he said.
In the case of the shrimp, Roberts, Baker and others had to crawl into Model Cave about a dozen times to collect enough specimens so researchers could describe it.
Baker said they found the shrimp on only two of those return trips, but they were able to gather about 30 of the creatures in all.
Baker said it is "extremely exciting" to be involved in the discovery of a new species, but she acknowledged that it might be hard to get the average park visitor excited about it.
"A lot of people will never be able to see these shrimp in person," she said.
New species are typically named by the scientists who describe them, not the people in the field who first discover them, Baker said. Many taxonomists prefer to name new plants and animals after where they are found.
A lot still isn't known about the White Pine shrimp. Its lack of eyes and pigment suggest it has been living in dark underground for a long time, but researchers aren't sure what the creatures eat.
Whatever it is, it must be tiny. The shrimp themselves are more Sea Monkey than jumbo prawn. They only measure about a quarter of an inch from antenna to tail.
Based on where they were found, the shrimp appear to prefer groundwater to the cold stream water that also fills — and, for much of the year, floods —- Model Cave.
"That makes it pretty delicate because if there is a change in the groundwater level, it could impact its habitat," she said.
Something in the water
Groundwater is a hot topic at Great Basin National Park, which could one day find itself bracketed by a network of pumps and pipelines built to funnel water south to the Las Vegas Valley.
The park lies at the northern end of the Southern Nevada Water Authority's plan to tap groundwater in rural Clark, Lincoln and White Pine counties. The multibillion-dollar project is under review by state and federal regulators.
On Wednesday, Baker said she and about 75 other people gathered at the elementary school in the town of Baker, just east of the park, for the second of nine public hearings the Bureau of Land Management is holding on the pipeline.
The project has met staunch opposition across rural Nevada, much of it from Spring and Snake valleys, the two massive watersheds on either side of the national park.
Zane Marshall is senior biologist for the water authority. He said the discovery of the shrimp and other new species at Great Basin could result in "additional processes" for monitoring and mitigating the effects of groundwater pumping. Ultimately, though, he said new species — even endangered ones — are unlikely to halt the pipeline because the authority won't be allowed to dry out caves and destroy habitat in the park anyway.
But that doesn't mean the shrimp won't be used to try to block the project.
Marshall said such campaigns are often waged by environmental groups.
The Center for Biological Diversity recently persuaded federal officials to consider listing 54 animals and plants in Nevada, many of them aquatic species found along the proposed pipeline alignment.
Marshall said he wouldn't be surprised to hear a similar call go up to protect the blind shrimp of Model Cave.
Source: Times Union
