There are more multi-celled organisms living in Utah’s salty inland sea than we thought.
When you think about animals swimming, growing and thriving in the Great Salt Lake’s water, brine shrimp and brine flies are likely the only two things that come to mind.
Werner came to Utah and started his lab at the U. right when pandemic lockdowns began. Without much to do in the lab, the professor found himself hiking a lot more, including at the Great Salt Lake’s Antelope Island. The pair started their worm survey in the spring of 2021, paddling around the lake. But as the lake dropped to a record low that year, and kept receding the following year, they had to use bikes instead.
“I remember this moment we found the first worm was really exciting,” Jung said. “We were stinky and salty because we had collected that day.”“We were over the moon, finding these small numbers of worms,” he added. “Then Julie said, ‘You know Michael, I think they might be inside the microbialites.’”“Julie had taken a hammer and was pulverizing a microbialite,” he said. “She found hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of worms. That really broke open this whole project for us.
It also underscores the importance of a healthy lake elevation for supporting life. When the Great Salt Lake shrunk to record lows in 2021 and 2022, it exposed many microbialites to the air and killed off the living colonies that formed them.Jung and Werner published their findings Tuesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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