In Mono Lake, which has been filling and receding since the Pleistocene, there lives a species of brine shrimp found nowhere else on earth. Artemia monica — an inch long, pink, nearly translucent, in concentrations so thick that the water turns orange. They have no gills. They breathe through the surface of their bodies. The lake is so alkaline — pH 10, the chemistry of old laundry — that it kills most things, which is why these persist.
In August, when the gulls come down from Negit Island to feed, the shrimp descend. Light pressure. They feel the shadow on the surface and go down. Then the shadow passes and they rise again. This is not fear. It is photosensitivity, a tropism, no more complex than a sunflower turning toward light, except the shrimp are turning away from it, because light above means birds.
The biologists who study them say they can survive for years as dormant cysts — dried on the shore, windblown, technically not alive, technically not dead. What they carry in those cysts is a blueprint for themselves, sealed against the alkaline flats in a shell that can wait out drought, wait out cold, wait out the absence of everything they need.
I don’t know what it means that this exists. But it exists.
The lake is receding. Los Angeles takes the water that feeds it. Every year the shoreline retreats and leaves behind a white crust of sodium carbonate, and in that crust you can find the casings of the shrimp, their exoskeletons, bleached and tiny as fragments of fingernail. The lake was sixty feet deeper before the water diversions. In the deeper lake there were more shrimp. The gulls remember, in whatever way gulls remember — they still come.
At the edge of the water there is a smell like very old stone, like something at the bottom of time. The water is slick. If you wash your hands in it, you’ll still feel the slick an hour later, even after rinsing. The silica. Everything here coats you slightly.
The tufa towers along the south shore are calcium carbonate formations, made where underwater springs met the alkaline lake and precipitated out. They look like pipe organs, or cauliflower, or ruined battlements, depending on how you’re inclined. They emerged as the lake went down. They were never meant to be seen above water. That they’re visible now is a consequence of taking the water away.
I keep thinking about the word endemic. A species endemic to a place. It means native, restricted, belonging to nowhere else. There is no good English word for the inverse — a place that belongs to a species, that is defined by what lives in it. Lakes do not have names for what they contain.
But Mono Lake without the brine shrimp would be a different lake. Would be less. Already the lake is less than it was.
At sunset the water turns the color of a bruise and then the color of fire and then the color of nothing in particular, which is also a color, and the shrimp go wherever shrimp go at night, down through the alkaline dark. They have been adapting for at least a million years. They are adapted to poison. They are adapted to the full weight of the sky pressing down on the water.
In 1941, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began diverting the streams that feed the lake. The shrimp did not know this. They went on being small and pink and necessary. They went on breathing through their skin. In 1994, a court ordered that enough water be returned to allow the lake to stabilize. The shrimp do not know this either. They are, as they have always been, completely indifferent to what humans decide about their continued existence.
This seems right to me. This seems like the appropriate response.