00:00It's no surprise that northern Arizona is a very dry place. It's a desert, but sometimes they get
00:06a lot of rain. And that is exactly what happened the last week and a half of July of this year.
00:12The region got almost five inches of rain, which is nearly 13 centimeters. And when it rains so
00:19much in the desert, these temporary ponds known as vernal pools form. And at Wipaki National Monument,
00:27some visitors notice these tadpole-like creatures swimming in one of the pools. So they quickly
00:34alerted the rangers and they said, hey, I saw the tadpoles in the pond at the ball court.
00:41There it is. Look at that. It looks like a little alien. Turns out it's a crustacean.
00:46Oh, yeah. Oh, here's the ball court. What is the ball court for? Do you know?
00:51Right. So the indigenous people of the region built this ceremonial ball court. And we're
00:57actually not sure what its purpose was. I did ask the ranger if it was used for something similar
01:05like the Maya ballgame. But she says they're just not sure. It's actually not in the same shape as
01:10the Maya ballgame court. So perhaps it's entirely different. But...
01:14Great breeding ground to just hold a lot of these little creatures. Yeah.
01:19Right. It's perfect for the vernal pool that formed. So to learn what this visitor was talking
01:26about, one of the rangers, I spoke with her. Her name is Lauren Carter, a lead interpretation
01:31ranger at Wipaki National Monument. She went down and scooped one up. You're looking at her hand
01:36right there. She says these creatures are known as triops and they look like little mini horseshoe crabs
01:43with three eyes. And yeah, look at those eyes there. So it has two compound eyes, which are common among
01:49arthropods, which is this massive group that includes insects, arachnids, scorpions, crustaceans. I
01:56mentioned this particular creature is a crustacean. And then it has a third eye. Look at that little dot
02:03between its two main eyes. Oh, it's so zen. I know. It looks very wise. So that third eye actually
02:11senses light. And the third eye is actually quite common among arthropods. And it turns out, like,
02:18for example, bees, they have their two compound eyes and they have three simple eyes. So this one
02:26is very prominent. You can see it right in the middle. But yeah, it's got three eyes. And that's
02:32how it got its name. Triops means three eyes in Greek. Cool. So how long can they stay dormant?
02:40That's kind of their survival trick. It's so dry in the desert. They can stay in their eggs for decades.
02:47And then once there's a heavy rainfall and these vernal pools form, they pop to life. They hatch. And
02:54within hours, they start gobbling up as much food as possible. So they can filter feed. They can
03:02nibble on, you know, seeds and leaves and roots. If it's like a scarce food situation,
03:09they can even cannibalize each other. Oh, no. So I feel bad for the smaller ones. They're probably
03:15more the prey for the larger triops. Is that probably what happened to his poor little missing
03:20left arm there? Because I'm looking at these other ones, you know, from stock images and they seem a little
03:25bit more even. I did notice that. Yeah. I'm not sure how he broke his little appendage. Poor,
03:32poor dude. At least it doesn't appear he was entirely eaten or whatever happened to him.
03:39Yeah. Tell me more about these little creatures. They're kind of cool looking.
03:43I know. So after they've eaten a lot, they molt a few times, you know, they're crustaceans,
03:47just like crabs and lobsters. And then they reach adulthood really fast, just over a week,
03:53I think eight or nine days, they reach adulthood. And they're ready to mate again, start the next
03:58generation. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. And you can tell by looking at this photo, but they're not that big.
04:05They're about 1.5 inches long, which is, you know, about four centimeters. And they have a few
04:12nicknames. So, you know, they're called triops. That's their genus name. But sometimes they're
04:18called tadpole shrimp. They're also known as dinosaur shrimp because they have this long evolutionary
04:25history. Their ancestors date back to the Denovian period, which lasted from 419 million to 359 million
04:34years ago. And they look pretty much the same as their ancestors did. It's really impressive.
04:40Yeah. I mean, but because they're so old, like, can we call them living fossils?
04:46Oh, my gosh. I'm really glad you asked that because this is, I think this is a term that
04:51gets thrown around, but it turns out that a lot of scientists really hate it. And Carter, the ranger
04:57I spoke with, she told me, I don't like the term living fossil because it causes a
05:03misunderstanding with the public that they haven't changed at all, but they have changed. They have
05:09evolved. It's just that the outward appearance of them is very similar to what they were millions of
05:14years ago. So put another way, they do look the same, but they are not the same. They have evolved.
05:21Their internal processes are different, at least some of them. So, yeah.
05:29That finding. And this is all just because of that insane rain that they had.
05:34Yeah. Yeah. They were, I guess the pond lasted three to four weeks is what Carter told me. So,
05:42you know, I said they reach adulthood quite rapidly and then it's time to mate. So how do they mate?
05:47You know, a male and a female might find each other and the female will lay eggs, but their circumstances
05:55are so, it's so interesting. Like maybe they won't be able to find a partner of the opposite sex. And it
06:02turns out that triops are hermaphrodites as well, which means they have both male and female organs.
06:08Yeah. So they, they have that flexibility and they're also parthenogenic, which means the,
06:17the females can produce, produce offspring from unfertilized eggs. So they don't need a male
06:23to, to spawn the next generation. More power to them. That's, I get,
06:28and that's why they've been around for so long. That's, that's pretty cool.
06:31Yeah. It's a pretty cool superpower.
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