Impacts of harvesting on brine shrimp (Artemia franciscana) in Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA

Toxicity of nanoplastics to zooplankton is influenced by temperature, salinity, and natural particulate matter

Increases in temperature/salinity promote nanoplastics toxicity, while organic matter/natural colloids mitigate toxicity.

A management case study for a new commercial fishery: brine shrimp harvesting in Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA

A fishery for brine shrimp (Artemia franciscana) cysts to supply the aquaculture industry considerably expanded in the late 1980s in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA. With this expansion, concerns emerged in the 1990s about the fishery's sustainability, especially its impact on the abundant western North American waterbirds that use the lake and feed on brine shrimp. We track the development of management strategies using adaptive management by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources (UDWR), which focused on the biology of the system and development of biology-based harvesting models. The models and their rationale are presented, their success in forecasting is evaluated, and implications for managing the harvest and conserving waterbirds are examined. We view this as an interesting case study because it transpired over a short time in a relatively simple system. This permitted us to clearly track management from the onset of a harvest market, through realization that the harvest had to be managed in the absence of needed biological knowledge, to the adaptive development of management strategies as biological knowledge was accumulated. The outcome illustrates the success that harvest management can attain with careful monitoring of the resource and terminating the harvest when a necessary escapement stock is attained.

Morphological and molecular clues for recording the first appearance of Artemia franciscana () in Egypt

Artemia franciscana is a native species to the New World, and became an exotic species to most parts of the world. The Egyptian hypersaline, continental Qaroun Lake (Fayoum Governorate, Middle of Egypt) is subjected to a gradually increasing salinity rates that approximate or exceed these of seawater. Artemia populations there are known to be parthenogenetic. Yet, these populations started to exhibit abnormal morphologies. Therefore, Qaroun Lake samples of Artemia were subjected to several morphological, biometric, and molecular phylogenetic analyses for accurate species identification and phylogeographic origin approximation. These analyses revealed the existence of the alien sexual species of brine shrimp A. franciscana in Qaroun Lake. The characteristics of the subspherical frontal knob with several spines on the top, ovisac lateral triangular lobe on both sides and its projection together with the biometrics confirmed this species morphotype. DNA barcoding and other molecular analyses based on PCR-based amplification and sequencing of the barcode region of the cytochrome oxidase subunit I gene (COI) exhibited that all the collected samples belong to five haplotypes. Egyptian A. franciscana COI sequences phylogeny and pairwise distances analysis exhibited closer proximity to Latin American strains than to the Northern American ones. A. franciscana presence may be ascribed to the migratory birds present in Qaroun Lake protectorate, since no marine aquaculture activity in Qaroun Lake is known. Therefore, and for the best of our knowledge, this is the first record of the invasive A. franciscana in Egypt.