325: Triops (AKA Tadpole Shrimp)

Thank you. Hi there, everybody. It's Ellen Weatherford. And Christian Weatherford. And this is Just the Zoo of Us, your favorite animal review podcast, where we rate your favorite animals out of 10 in the categories of effectiveness, ingenuity, and aesthetics. We are not zoological experts, but we try our best to bring the best and most accurate information that we can. We don't really have any updates for the front of the episode. Oh? We could update people on our Stardew Valley farm, which is going really well. we're in year two i don't think we had even started last time we recorded that's true we've been both of us separately have played stardew valley extensively on our own but now this is our first time actually playing together couch co-op couch co-op and fully on the couch yes using a steam deck yeah and our farm is going great you guys everything's coming up weatherford we are married uh-huh in game and we are using mods nothing silly yet no not yet that i know of because you're the one installing all the mods well so we're using all the quality of life type things it's gonna get to the point where we're gonna forget what was a mod and what was not and if we ever go back to play without mods installed i can never go back i think i'm ruined on vanilla stardew valley forever so that that's going really well we did get married in game which now I'm realizing was not the most optimal strategy because I realized we could have both married separate people and then have had way more because you get like different perks and stuff based on who you marry. I think we should have strategized our marriage options a little bit more. I don't mean Max. I pick what's fun. Is marrying me fun? Yeah. uh so this week i have an animal to talk about that i'm not going to do the whole like trying to see if you can guess what animal we're talking about this week oh good because i don't know if you know this animal exists i think you could look directly at it and not identify what it is okay have you ever heard of triops no have you ever heard of a tadpole shrimp i've heard those two things separately yeah right like it's two concepts that seem adjacent sure but when you mash them together you're like i don't know what this is okay have you ever perhaps seen a packet of little eggs that you can buy and put in the water and talking about sea monkeys it's not sea monkeys actually sea monkeys i think are like brine shrimp i want to say this is different from sea monkeys. But it's similar. You can get a little packet. They're often sold at book fairs or museum gift shops and stuff. You can get a little packet of eggs, put them in water, and they'll hatch. Okay. So that's what I'm talking about this week. And these were submitted by Mars Kesey. Thank you, Mars. Getting my information from a lot of different sources that will be cited in the episode description. And so if you, like Christian, have no idea what I'm talking about. I should describe this little fellow. They do not look like something that should be alive on earth today. They have this sort of broad, flat, tadpole-shaped carapace at the front of the body, a lot like a horseshoe crab, actually. And then this long segmented tail section that ends in these two really long whip-like extensions, kind of like an earwig almost. And then all of That is over hundreds of spindly little feathery legs. You got a picture for me? I'm pulling up a picture for you. I know everything. This is beyond my comprehension. Yeah, it's incomprehensible. It's Lovecraftian. So here's what we're talking about. This little fellow right here. Huh. Have you ever seen one before? It does kind of look familiar. It would not be impossible for you to have just sort of like come across them. I don't think in person, no. but I feel like I've seen this elsewhere, perhaps online somewhere. Yeah, probably. They're very commonly kept in tanks because they're super easy to take care of. So people will keep them as a little hobby. You can keep them on a desk, basically. They're just a little guy. They are only about one to two inches long. So they're really, really little. Not microscopic, but very small. And they are freshwater crustaceans that can be found all over the world. I mean, there's a few different species of them. And these species are just found pretty much everywhere. So you probably have some sort of local triops species. They are a family of something called branchiopods, which we have never talked about on the show before. This is an entire family of crustaceans. So they are neither tadpole nor shrimp. But closer to shrimp, it sounds like. Yeah, closer to shrimp than tadpole. Assuming that a tadpole is just like a baby frog, right? Yeah, amphibian of some sort. Yeah, they're really tadpole in sort of shape only. But they are a crustacean, just not technically a shrimp. And they do kind of look like horseshoe crabs or maybe isopods, but they are only very, very distantly related. We talked about horseshoe crabs a long time ago. Do you remember where they are sort of family-wise? No. Wait, hold on. What horseshoe crabs are like where they fall? What's the word for 10? Is it dexapod? Oh, decapod? So those would be crabs. Oh, okay. Crabs are decapods. Okay. But horseshoe crabs are not decapods. They weren't? Oh, okay. They're closer to spiders. Oh, okay. Closer to the arachnid group. They're collicerates. Huh. This kind of brings up something that a lot of times people will describe triops, especially if they're like trying to sell you them. Okay. They will be marketed as living fossils. Okay. The idea being that their outward appearance has barely changed at all since the Devonian period. Like outwardly, just looking at them, they look basically exactly the way they did about 350 million years ago. Okay, I was going to say, I don't know when the Devonian period was. The Devonian period is kind of like weird aquatic things. time this is like when you start to see weird like placoderms like dunkleosteus and this is when like life hadn't really taken off on land super like that much quite yet this was a hundred million years before the dinosaurs when you start to see fossils of what are basically very very similar to the triops that we have today okay but that's not to say that they're exactly the same For a long time, there were fossils of these that were thought to be like literally in the exact same species that we now still have that were like 350 million years old. But then DNA analysis showed that they actually weren't the same. They looked like them, but they were quite different like genetically. So actually they have, it's like under the hood, like inside, they've been changing a lot over time. But like outwardly, they look exactly the same. But their genetics have been changing. their internal structures their reproduction like all of that has been evolving over time but you wouldn't know that just by looking at them i mean who among us who among us hasn't changed drastically on the inside while still looking like the same person after all this it's still you yeah yeah sometimes i do feel like oh don't worry i'm also stagnating on the inside rest assured i'm exactly the same i was last time yeah so we call that character development they're a dynamic character it's what's on the inside that's changing uh so if this is anyone's first time listening to this podcast the first category that we rate animals on is effectiveness this is things built into the animal's body that let it do a good job of the things that it's trying to do and i am giving them a 10 out of 10 they have been externally like physically largely unchanged for 350 million years they've pretty much found the perfect body plan and they're like that's actually good we don't really need to that part print like we're done here final.pdf now are these saltwater only creatures fresh water fresh water they're fresh water only yes oh not salt water okay got it which is interesting right because like when you think of something being like very devonian you think of them being from the ocean which you know all life starts in the ocean right like we all come from the ocean but they've departed far enough from the ocean that they're like just freshwater only which came first do you think oh this is fun freshwater or ocean water ocean water ocean water came before like land there couldn't have been freshwater without land right true yeah I guess I'm really confident in this I'm extremely confident for having no research into this I've never looked this up but I I'm gonna put like 95 confident on that that salt water came first you know there's a sort of like creation myth I'm trying to remember what this was that is actually where the name Abzu comes from where like all of life and all of existence was originally just ocean and then from ocean water spawned the like sort of god of fresh water yeah which is interesting for being a creation myth because like yeah that is actually kind of how that happened i think it's egyptian i'm gonna have to go back and double check but maybe it's mesopotamian oh i think it is a mesopotamian because i remembered looking into this when i was doing the notes for the dragon bonus episode that we did um but yeah i'm pretty sure saltwater came first. Why? Why do you seem so perplexed by this? I don't know. Why are you hung up on this? It sounds like it's to me a more interesting version of the chicken and egg. Way more interesting. The chicken, as previously discussed, the chicken and egg question is very easy. Yeah, once you dig into it just a little bit. Yeah, the egg came first. It's not even a question. Right. But with the ocean I wonder if it was ever a salinity that today we would consider a freshwater salinity no i don think so right Because the salt in the ocean was probably just like salt that was already Dissolved from rock and such. Right, dissolved from the rock, the sort of molten crust of the earth, right? Don't worry, guys. I phoned a friend. I posed this question to an actual geologist named Megan Ankney, who is also the host of a really cool podcast called Spooky Science Sisters. And she said, quote, so it's probably saltwater or oceans first as early as 4.4 billion years ago. But the formation of continental crust and freshwater accumulation and active water cycle has been getting pushed earlier and earlier by recent research. So it may be that oceans and bodies of freshwater and stream systems were sort of developing all at the same time within the first few hundred million years of Earth's existence. but probably development of land masses and accumulation of bodies of fresh water overall lagged behind i think consensus dates right now are oceans or at least some salt water as early as 4.4 billion years and freshwater bodies closer to 4 billion everyone say thank you megan i'll try not to be distracted by this thought it's too late this was literally this i put zero seconds of thought into that when i was doing my notes for this. I did not prepare for that at all. I don't even remember what I was talking about. Sorry. So a lot of people, as I mentioned, may have first heard of tadpole shrimp at something like a museum gift shop or a scholastic book fair. I don't know if there are book fairs in other countries, actually. I don't know if that's a distinctly American thing. Let me know if you don't live in America. Let me know if your schools also had book fairs where like these traveling companies would set up in your school library or gym usually they would like set up a bunch of tables with books you could buy well i think the perhaps distinctly american part of this would be the to buy part oh yeah normally they're just called libraries you know but you'd have to like go home and ask your mom for 20 bucks to buy some stuff at the book fair and then nobody buys books at the book fair you buy little erasers oh you're figuring What's the best part? What's the best part? Where before it happens, they hand out paper catalogs. Yes. Some of the popular books and items available. That's true. You can pre-order or at least plan out what you want to buy. Yeah, like circle the things you want, add up the cost so that your mom would know how much cash to send you with. I wonder if they accept card nowadays. Well, you know how it goes for me. My experience of the book fair was, was being given the paper catalog, immediately losing it, forgetting all about it, not asking my mom for money for the book fair because I did forget it was happening. And then showing up on the day of the book fair, seeing that it was happening and been like, man, I wish I had remembered to ask my mom for money. So I never got to participate in the book fair because consistently every single year I forgot to ask my mom for money. I wouldn't be surprised if this is fully digital now. No, they still do it. Isaac got that Unico comic book from the book fair. That's where he got it from. Okay. They definitely still do the Scholastic book fairs. But anyway, you can buy tri-ops eggs at these book fairs a lot of times. And the idea is you drop these dried eggs into some water, and you usually toss a couple veggies in there. You could put a couple diced carrots or something in there, and then you watch them just come to life. so live animal eggs don't really seem like the most shelf stable product right unless unless it's the kind of animal that's supposed to survive in dried up riverbeds that's exactly what it is you're exactly correct about that so triops adapted to live in very shallow freshwater ponds that dry and fill back up with rainwater seasonally and these are called do you know the word for this there's a word for this. Hit me with it. They could be called ephemeral pools or they could be called vernal pools, which I feel like a vernal pool sounds like something you'd read in like a poem or something like that. I was thinking Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, yeah, it does sound like that, too. I was thinking it sounds like Jabberwocky, sort of like, oh, you know what I'm thinking of? The Vorpal Blade. Sure. That's what it sounds like to me. Vernal sounds exactly like that to me. And we actually talked about vernal pools in the wood frog episode some time ago. So since water is not accessible to them year round, and sometimes there are droughts, right? Which means that you can't even always rely on the pond coming back next year. Like even that's not guaranteed. If there's a bad drought season or something, it might be years before that pond comes back. So triops can enter a state of diapause. So they basically hit pause on the development of the larva and stay in this metabolically inert state, which they can stay in for decades at a time. Like in labs, they've been kept for 25 plus years, just completely dried out for 20 plus years at a time. And then all they need is enough water. And I think like the temperature range has to be right. And they just pop back to life like nothing happened. Now, have they found the upper limit or is it just like they're just waiting to see? There is an upper limit and it appears to be boiling. So if you boil them, they will not come back to life. Sorry, I meant time. Like have they found the upper limit of how long they can stay in this? Or is it just like that's 25 years is just how long they've been checking? Yeah. I mean, I've actually seen a few different sources report different time ranges. And the only actual reputable source that I found said 29 years. was like the longest one had been recorded but i think it is that sort of thing of like that's just the longest that's been recorded yeah like we ran out of eggs after that sorry or more like like we just didn't you know keep records of this experiment before that we got bored yeah we forgot the guy doing it died of old age or me like i just forgot where i put them so while they're in the state of diapause they are resistant to a lot of extreme conditions so extreme heat they can survive up to boiling temperature basically anything short of boiling and they're fine i want to tell you about an experiment in which the russian academy of sciences institute of biomedical problems which i think is an interesting name for an institute biomedical problems that's interesting uh they conducted an experiment involving triops eggs along with the eggs and dehydrated larva of some other invertebrates, even some fish, some fungal spores, some plant materials, things like that. And all of these specimens were fastened to an outer wall of the International Space Station and exposed to space, to just outer space. I was guessing that to be the next thing. Was it because I said it was a Russian thing? No, because I was already like, this is reminding me of the tardigrade a little bit. It did remind me a lot of the tardigrade, too. Because the tardigrade could also do something like that where it could, like, curl up into a ball and enter this sort of, like, biostasis. Much smaller scale, but still. Yeah. And they could also be blasted with space lasers, basically, and they're fine. But, yeah, they exposed these triops eggs, which even in the study I was reading about it, all they said about the triops eggs was that they were purchased commercially. Okay. I have to imagine they sent these like scientists and lab coats out to their nearest scholastic book fair and bought just like a packet of Triops eggs. So they were exposed to outer space for between 13 and 18 months. Wow. So it wasn't just to put them out there real quick and then bring them right back. Like they slapped them on the side of the space station and then were like, good luck. and they just left them out there in space for over a year. And actually, most of the specimens did pretty well. This involved extreme fluctuations in temperature. So when they brought the canisters back in, they saw that parts, I guess there was a plastic piece of the container. They had been melted. So it must have gotten pretty hot. Also, just cosmic radiation. That's also a huge... It's not good for you. Space is not good for you. Yeah, yeah. But the Triops eggs, along with most of the other living specimens, survived and, importantly, were successfully reactivated and hatched after returning to Earth. So they made it back to Earth, plopped them in some water, and they acted like nothing had happened. Everything was totally fine. Which I think this could be a really good setup to, like, a sci-fi story. like eggs of some sort of like invertebrate creature that are like incubated in space yeah and then cosmic radiation and then they come back and hatch them and it's some sort of crazy alien monster right yeah yeah that's just my thought that's a free idea anyone can have that also mission five of the student spaceflight experiments program sent tri-ops back to the international space station uh nasa reported students from rebley elementary and mark west charter school in california examine whether triops longa caudus or tadpole shrimp could be grown in microgravity as a food source for long-term missions the species small size and high protein content make that an attractive possibility so that was interesting that's an interesting application of that like yeah the idea that you could store eggs which are very very small when dehydrated and then just rehydrate them and hatch them and have this sort of like food supply yeah i mean i guess they themselves need a nutrition source right so that is one i guess you'd have to also bring a food supply to feed the triops yeah and is that easier than just bringing your own direct food supply right like at that point just eat the like if you're gonna be feeding them carrots just eat the carrots you know like now you have to bring two things although the i think the idea is that triops are a good source of protein sure which you wouldn't otherwise be getting from the vegetation that they would feed on right and that's something they do right they grow vegetation and microgravity right so you could just use the vegetation you're already growing that's true to feed the triops and then you know eat the traps for a little protein source infinite food glitch yeah well it's not infinite you still need to feed them something you know but like it could be a good sustainable like protein source like it could be filling a part of the dietary needs that you wouldn ordinarily be getting you just have to get over that part of the brain that gets icked out by eating bugs see i would just i know you saying they not shrimp but that where my mind goes first do you feel like they're shrimp enough that they would not trigger the don't eat bug instinct uh i guess your threshold for don't eat bug is much lower than mine because you do eat shrimp yeah see that's why i'm thinking the real bottleneck and the technology here is the culinary part oh we haven't explored the i bet culinary applications of tadpole shrimp enough yeah how would you prepare them scampi try up scampi yeah i don't know what that is i don't know what shrimp scampi is is that a dish it's a pasta dish usually oh yeah and lemon see i feel like if they're in a pasta sauce yeah they're small enough that I feel like I could get past that. Yeah. And I know they're teeny and you know, you're not going to deshell them or anything. True. Just crunch them. Yeah. You got to power through that. You know what? Also this probably people that have a shellfish allergy would also not be able to eat these. Yeah, that's true. So keep that in mind. Now these long dormant periods mean that sometimes triops appear where humans really do not expect them to appear. Okay. They It can be kind of a sleeper agent. So for example, in 2021, a summer monsoon brought a downpour to Arizona, which filled a hundred foot wide, 900 year old circular ball court that was built and used by the indigenous Pueblo people. And park rangers were surprised to find that the normally totally dry ball court was suddenly full of tadpole shrimp. Oh. So these park rangers have been working there for years, and it's never really flooded before anything. Imagine, you get this a couple inches of rainwater in there, and then you look down and you see the whole dang thing is full of these tiny prehistoric looking shrimp in there. Could you give me a sense of scale? Because I've been assuming how big these things are. Yeah, they're only like a couple inches, like one to two inches long. What about their eggs? Tiny, tiny, tiny. Like green pea? Poppy seed. Poppy seed. Yeah. But they're dried out and you wouldn't necessarily see them in something like sand or something. So basically you just get a good rain and then, oh, hey, there's thousands of shrimp in here. Now, in this case, do you know if they got to the point where they were able to reproduce and lay more eggs before they dried out again? They may have because they will eat each other. Like if there's nothing else to eat, they'll eat each other. But there's no way to know until the next time it happens. Like we won't know if they did until next time you get a monsoon that floods the ball court. Right. Because I'm thinking like their ability to resist like drought conditions probably does not extend into the adult stage. Right. Right. But if they reach the adult stage, all they have to do is lay those eggs. Yes. And it doesn't matter if the adults die. They've already laid the eggs. Yeah. It's like a really weird like cicada kind of pattern. Yeah. It is kind of cicada like a little bit. And then a couple years later in 2023, once again, unusually heavy rain in Nevada's Black Rock Desert turned the Burning Man Festival into basically a giant mud flat. I don't know if you remember when this happened, but there were a lot of really funny videos on social media of Burning Man getting just like rained out. And this is like a very extremely dry. This is desert, right? It's an extremely dry area. And in the American Southwest, the ground in a lot of places is it's so dry that water can't really permeate the ground. Like water can't soak into the ground because there's this layer of just like crust on top of it and how dry it is. So when the water can't really like soak into the ground, it just sits on top of it. So there was this heavy, heavy rains at Burning Man turned the festival into just a giant mud puddle, basically. People were just not prepared at all for this level of mud. There's water everywhere. And thousands and thousands of tadpole shrimp start wiggling out of the mud. Well, it's a good thing everyone at Burning Man is in a great headspace. I was thinking the exact same thing. I was like, can you imagine? Being in the state one would be in at Burning Man and looking down at your feet and seeing just thousands of, in addition, them being such like a prehistoric alien looking thing that you've probably never seen before in your life. And now there's thousands of them crawling all over you. Jeez. can you imagine i'd be worried that i time traveled yeah which that is also a really smart way for them to sneak into the festival without paying for admission that's that's a that's a great strategy all you got to do is lay your eggs there 20 years ahead of time yeah and then wait for the festival to be built around you easy they don't want you to know this one cool trick now once the eggs do hatch the adult triops only live for like one to three months many of the species can actually fertilize themselves so a single batch of eggs with a steady food source can yield generations and generations of like an explosive boom of tadpole shrimp so you can really you can get a lot from a small sort of sample size now the name triops comes from the fact that they have three eyes okay there is a pair of compound eyes in the front and then like a third eye on top that points straight up the eyes don't see very well though they're mostly just for detecting like light and movement there is actually i would like to cite uh i'm gonna play a song for you i'm gonna see if you can guess who it is this is not good for me no you'll know it rabbits have two eyes and whales have two eyes Oh, that's They Might Be Giants. They might be giants. They might be giants. But Triops has three eyes. Triops has three eyes. Two eyes on a face are usually enough. But Triops has got one that looks up and one that looks around. I was really surprised to find that They Might Be Giants has a song about Triops. It's not too surprising knowing the other kind of songs they've come out with. It is kind of like in their They Might Be Giants kids. Yeah. you know like they they have sort of like a separate branding for their music that's aimed at kids and it's part of that yeah um but yeah when i saw that i was like oh it's so cute it's a catchy little song yeah i'm just like how many kids are like looking up songs about tryops well maybe kids who got the tryops eggs yeah fair and in addition to having three eyes they can have up to 140 legs okay cool which is enough i think i think we're well past that's enough slices but they so they swim in this sort of like undulating wave pattern if you've ever seen videos of like a shrimp on a treadmill that's what it kind of looks like uh but the legs aren't all just legs a lot of their legs have sensory receptors so they can act as antenna some of the legs have external gill structures so that they can get more oxygen from the water um and some of the legs can be specialized for transporting eggs oh yeah so there's there's a leg for everything what you need an allen wrench you need a cheese grater what do you need i gotta like for that i know how much you hate single purpose tools yeah well kitchen tools yes single application kitchen appliances don't get this man a waffle iron go don't get this man a panini press don't get this man uh like one of those air popcorn poppers oh yeah Yeah, that's only made for one thing. Yeah, get you a Triops because they got a leg for everything. They got a potato peeler in there. Let's take a quick break to hear from our friends on the MaxFun Network, and then I'm going to get to the last few things for Triops. If you want to know what's going on in the world of movies, you should be listening to Maximum Film so we can tell you all about it. Okay, but what if you already know what's going on in the world of movies? What if you're kind of obsessed with movies? Like maybe you have a problem? Well, then you should definitely be listening to Maximum Film, because we too have that problem, and it's important you know you're not alone. We're talking indies you'll want to seek out. Blockbusters and blockbusting wannabes. Classics we can't get enough of. I'm comedian and writer Kevin Avery. I'm film critic Alonzo Duraldi. I'm festival programmer and producer Drea Clark. Together, we're Maximum Film. Smart about movies and Hollywood, so you don't have to be. But if you already are, that's also great. And hey, we see you. New episodes every week on MaximumFun.org. you don't know what it is. You can be different, but it can be a superpower. What would you say to others who might be considering supporting the show? What would be your sales pitch to them? If you love this thing, if you are getting all of this joy and comfort from this thing, make sure that this thing that you like will continue. Thank you so much, Khalil, for taking the time to talk to me today and for listening to the show. My God, it means a lot to just know people are really listening and valuing what they're hearing. Thank you so much. Become a Maximum Fun member now at MaximumFun.org. The next category that we rate animals on is ingenuity. These are behaviors, things they're doing with their body to navigate their world, solve problems they face. I'm giving Triops a 3 out of 10. I mean, you ain't got to be that smart. You really don't have to. And Triops eggs do seem to respond to some sort of signal that is given by the active adults around them, prompting them to come out of diapause and hatch. And researchers that were studying this suggest that the adults may be giving off some kind of chemical cue. Maybe it's the movement of the adults around them that's like mechanically stimulating the eggs to come out of diapause because maybe when they're like, you know, digging around in the sand around them maybe that causing the eggs to like you know be disturbed and wake up out of diapause And that this might be a defensive response from the eggs because the adults they feeding along the bottom and they are not discriminating between their food items. So they very well may eat the dormant eggs. So if the eggs stay dormant too long while there are active triops around them, they could get sucked up and eaten. So if they start to like somehow sense that there's already an active adult triops nearby, they will start to come out of diapause. The mechanism behind that is not understood. They don't know what it is. They just know that there's some correlation between adult triops activity and the eggs like somehow being signaled to come out. And that's not the only trigger, of course. Right. They'll just do it even if there's no adult triops around. But it seems like the activity of the adults around them prompts them to come out faster or come out earlier than they might have otherwise. Interestingly, triops tend to move towards light rather than away from it. Most crustaceans prefer to hide, so they'll move towards shadow. They're more inclined to move away from light sources. But triops move towards light sources. That's very bug of them. It is giving bug. It's moth behavior. Moth-coated. Can you think of why they might be interested in moving towards light rather than away from it? Let's see. Perhaps to get to the surface of the water. I mean, sometimes they'll feed on the surface, but the surface isn't their primary destination. Then no. So the idea is that light usually means algae. So if there's going to be a light source there, light stimulates the growth of algae. Oh, I mean, so that means they're trying to get to where the algae grows, which is normally closer to the surface. Yeah, not necessarily like at the surface. They can have algae like throughout the water column. But yeah, they're attracted to where algae would be more likely to be. When you first said it, I thought you meant like algae that emits its own light. Oh, that's way cooler. That'd be awesome. Write that down. Write that down. The last category would rate animals on aesthetics. I'm giving them a 7 out of 10. I think these things are kind of cute. Okay. I think they're adorable. I don't know. What do you think? They're pretty interesting. interesting for sure were all the colors in the pictures you showed me like natural or those like dyed specimens or no i mean they're pretty straightforward little like you know grayish brownish okay nothing interesting color wise going on there but i do like that they look like a little spaceship yeah that's pretty cool and i think there's something interesting about like the prehistoric effect like it feels like you're like looking into like the very very distant past or like an alien planet or something like which i'm sure is i'm only getting that effect because i just don't see them very often right yeah like i'm sure if i had never seen a dragonfly i'd feel the same way about that right but like i'm sure they only have that effect on me because they're unfamiliar to me personally uh but i think they're really cool i think they're neat to watch yeah i watched this video it was posted on reddit of a tadpole shrimp that was molting and so it was like shedding its outer layer of exoskeleton and it was doing this really interesting movement it was kind of like it looked like if you were trying to like wiggle out of like a pair of pants that was too tight yeah it was like twisting around and like you know arching its back and flipping around and stuff like that and then you can see the like outer layer of the exoskeleton like pop off and then it keeps kind of like twisting around because it's kind of like resetting all of its like joints segments and stuff that was really interesting to watch i like that i find it interesting too when watching crabs do this yeah it can be a little disturbing but yeah it's kind of gross because like they can look all pink and yeah and soft and sometimes a little bit now their conservation status so globally they're doing fine i mean they're like the opposite of endangered like it's if the triops are in trouble we have bigger problems like sure i think it's going to take like global cataclysm to threaten the triops i feel like but there are four species of triops that are listed as either endangered or critically endangered on the iucn red list which i was very surprised to see you almost never see invertebrates on the iucn red list i feel like but all three of those species are endemic to the iberian peninsula oh so spain and portugal and they are primarily threatened by disturbances to their freshwater habitats due to agricultural and urban development. So things like, you know, dams or agricultural land conversion is threatening the sort of like water cycle that they rely on to come back to life when they need to. So those particular types of triops are in trouble and protecting their habitats is a good way to protect them. This next part I wanted to describe as the slogan here is triops giveth and triops taketh away. So triops are both pest and pest control at the same time. They are a predator of mosquito larva. So triops will eat. They love to eat mosquito larva, including, importantly, the mosquitoes that spread West Nile virus. All right. So they can be really, really helpful in controlling mosquito populations. And they can be really good at eating the weeds out of aquatic crop farms like rice paddies. so if you've ever seen rice grow they have to grow sort of like shooting out of water still shallow water i've read i don't know how accurate this is that rice does not have to grow that way but it can and that helps them keep pests away from the rice plant well you know the thing that i was reading about it is that one method of planting rice involves growing them initially somewhere else and then once they've reached past like that initial shoot stage once they're a little bit bigger and tougher than transplanting them into the water right because at that point they're big enough that triops won't eat the shoots oh okay but it will eat all the weeds around it okay so that is one method that like you can use to not get your rice eaten yeah by triops so they're not that picky so if you grow the rice directly in the water sometimes they will eat the rice shoots so like that then they can be a pest but if you grow it somewhere else and then transplant it into the water when it's already big enough then traps can't eat it yeah and then you've just got a little pest control guy swimming around yeah but then there's also like invasive species of traps in some areas where like they're not adapted to like eat the right things and so then you can get like an invasive traps pest um but they can kind of go either way okay so you know there's there's ways that farmers can adapt their rice growing techniques to play nice with triops but yeah i mean that's triops you can just put them in a little bowl you know and because they are adapted to living in you know very shallow freshwater conditions they're extremely easy to take care of it's a great project for kids you know like it's a cool thing to just watch them grow and you can make a little it's easy to just make a little tank for them and set them off. It's a good way to teach about the end of a life cycle too, I think. Yeah, because you've only got max like 90 days. Yeah. The clock is ticking. Yeah, which I guess every pet could be a lesson for that. But this one is like a very short one. Also, self-solving problem. True. You got your own built-in cleanup crew. True, yes. They will clean up after themselves. Oh, I see. Which, I mean, if that's a lesson you're ready to teach your kid, I mean. listen if you won't talk to your kid about cannibalism who will oh no so that's triops i found myself while in during the course of doing these notes i found myself so tempted to just because i kept coming up on like amazon pages for just triops eggs and i saw that they were only like 13 bucks and i was like oh i'm this close i'm so close i'm so close to just but then you got to get all the other stuff for it and but like the idea is that they'll eat such a wide variety of stuff that like you can just toss a couple veggies in there and they're they're good to go you don't have to like you know continually buy another food source for them though you could put like lettuce in there and it's fine kind of give a little offering from the compost bin every once in a while yeah exactly that's such a good use for the compost bin so i would just know i was tempted yeah i fought this is where the tarantula idea came from you know that was a separate idea but i am also strongly considering getting a pet tarantula am i having a quarter what is it's not a quarter life crisis 30 whatever point in life i'm at i'm having a crisis of some kind i'm having a get a critter for my house crisis. So that's Traps. Thanks, babe. Thank you, dear listener, for spending this time with us and learning with us. It means the world to us. If you had a good time, I would love if you left behind some nice words for us in a review on your podcast app of choice. Like, my dog's name is Quinn, who wrote, this podcast is such a good source of information. I want to be a vet, and this is such a good way to learn. I want to suggest the ladybug, roly-poly, and sand cats. Ooh. Sand cats? Yeah. I saw sand cats at the Living Desert Zoo in Palm Springs. Really cute little guys. These people bring joy to my day and make me laugh. My family loves me sharing cool facts. Thank you, guys. Thank you. My dog's name is Quinn. Thank you, Quinn's parent, whoever you are. And if you want to come hang out with us online, we're on Facebook, Instagram, Discord, Blue Sky. 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