My wife and I decided to go for a ride out to a nearby island that is geographically located in the middle of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The lake has diminished in size due to years of drought-like conditions. The Great Salt Lake has no outlets and it is dependent on evaporation and two minor streams flowing into it, to refresh itself. The salty lake is a natural environment for breeding tiny brine shrimp. There is at least one company that harvests the brine shrimp as an industry. I believe the brine shrimp are made into a food source as well as fertilizer. Brine shrimp have a short life and those not harvested wash up on the lakes shores and begin to deteriorate causing a black rotting smell. The black fringe can be seen around the shoreline. The smell often keeps tourists and visitors away from getting too close to the lake during the end of the brine shrimp season. However, like everything else in nature there are other creatures who depend on the rotting brine shrimp to survive. They are the short lived brine flies. The brine fly larvae lay in the water along the shore and they depend on the rotting brine shrimp as nourishment to mature into the adult fly. The adult flies live along the shores and seldom, if ever, fly or jump more than a couple of feet off the ground. Visitors are often heard to say how disgusting they are, because they appear to be trying to get on human visitors; in actuality, they never land on humans. Their only purpose in life is to clean up the dead brine shrimp from the lake shore. Now, the question turns to, what happens to the millions of brine flies that clean up the dead brine shrimp?
The Great Salt Lake is a resting place for migratory birds. Millions of birds, of many different kinds who are migrating stop at the Great Salt Lake and its nearby swampy areas. They stop to rest and eat before moving on in those areas we call wetlands. They eat the brine flies, or should I say, they stuff themselves until they have stored a layer of fat under their skins giving them sufficient energy to complete their trip. Not only do the flies supply migratory birds with their necessary food storage but they also maintain the lives and good health of the local seagulls. If you were to walk along the black fringed beach of the Great Salt Lake you would see the brine flies jump up in front of you, about two feet high, and move to either side of the black decaying brine shrimp. As far as you may walk along the black strip of shoreline, they will jump out of your way. The seagulls have a dinner procedure. They swoop down toward the black strip and as they do so the brine flies jump up and when they do, the seagulls catch as many of them as they can in their beaks. It is called the art of survival, or the survival of the fittest.
As we study nature, each foul, each animal, etc. will have a routine of providing for themselves with a source of a continuing and sustaining food. Domesticated animals wait for the farmer to bring their food to them or he merely turns them out to pasture for them to graze on the grass as they please. Some may say that the flies are disgusting. They feel that the rotting brine shrimp along the shore should be cleaned up by a maintenance crew. That is to admit that we do not understand nature and the earth’s ecosystem. Ella Sorensen, writing of the Brine Flies, made the following statement; “Acquaintance often leads to enlightenment as appreciation erodes away bias.” May God bless us to become acquainted with life and the way it works so that we may lose many of our biases.