- [Liz Adeola] You may not think of the Great Salt Lake as a fine dining destination, but it's just that, for nearly 10 million birds a year.

What keeps them coming back?

Mm-mmm, brine shrimp.

The salt-loving crustaceans that also fuel a multi-million dollar industry.

(boat engine revving) (gentle music) - [Kyle] I feel like I have one of the greatest offices in the world.

I'm a wildlife biologist with the Great Salt Lake Ecosystem Program for the division of wildlife resources for the state of Utah.

And this is where we are once a week, out on the lake trying to collect different samples, in some capacity whether it's doing brine shrimp samples, like this today.

We're doing bird surveys in the spring, in the fall.

The Great Salt Lake Ecosystem Program was developed in the mid 90s, mostly to regulate the commercial harvest of brine shrimp.

But we now incorporate looking at the migratory birds that use the lake.

- It's not just one lake, we focus on five separate bodies of water because we have the North Arm, which is at 30% salinity or saturation.

That's that pink water.

And we have the South Arm of Great Salt Lake which typically sits around 15% on average.

- [Kyle] Great Salt Lake is one large complex of wetland systems, diked pounded wetlands.

Then the outside the dike wetland systems that lead into the freshwater bays of the Lake.

Farmington Bay, Ogden Bay, Bear River Bay.

That then feed into the Saltwater Bays, Gilbert Bay and then the Hypersaline North Arm, Gunnison Bay.

- [Ashley] Nothing other than millions of species of bacteria and archaic live in the North Arm.

And then we have the South Arm here which is home to our brine shrimp, and brine flies.

- [Kyle] Here at Great Salt Lake we have Artemia Franciscana That's the same brine shrimp that occurred in the Pacific Ocean.

- The interesting thing about the species of brine shrimp that is on Great Salt Lake, is they can give live birth to Nauplii, which are baby shrimp.

They can lay eggs, which hatch in 1 to 3 days, or they can lay cysts, which are eggs, but surrounded by a thick chorion shell, that helps protect them from drought, getting exposed on the beach or freezing winter temperatures, and then they can later hatch out.

(boat engine revving) I didn't know about this, until I had this job actually, and I think a lot of people don't realize that there's a multimillion dollar commercial fishery on Great Salt Lake.

It happens every year from October to January.

- So the brine shrimp that are native to Great Salt Lake are unique in that they create a cyst, a dormant egg that can survive really harsh conditions.

That's their target product.

Because you can process it, dry it out, put it in cans, ship it around the world and that's used in the Aquaculture industry.

- For some reason that we still don't know.

The cysts will float at certain times certain conditions, they'll float, and it produces like, an oil slick on the surface of the water, just like an oil slick.

We deploy a, like, a spill containment boom.

And there's two boats and you're moving very, very slowly because the egg doesn't want to be caught.

It wants to go under, it wants to get away from you.

So you have to be very, very careful about that.

Sometimes the boom will take hours, hours to do it.

when we close the boom and cinch it up so that the egg is thick and it's not going anywhere then the big boat pulls up and with hydraulic pumps you pump that into big drainable bags and the water drains out and you're left with the egg.

When that boat goes back to the marina, then we crane them off onto the truck that goes back to the plant.

That's usually the way the harvest goes.

- They're regulated to the point where they're allowed to take the harvestable excess.

So we need 21 cysts per liter left over in the spring to restart the population of brine shrimp because all the brine adults usually die over the winter out of the waters.

6,0 With that, regulation of 21 cysts per liter somehow we have to figure out what the cyst concentrations are around this point.

So to do that, we do multiple measures of the abiotic factors.

- I am sending our mysisd probes down in the water, throughout the water, because I'm going to measure again.

The dissolved oxygen, the salinity and the temperature.

And we do that so our shells have a better chance.

(gentle music) - The salinity of the brine is 22.2 - [Ashley] 22.2 - [Kyle] We also do net pulls where we go look at the density and demographics of the brine shrimp in the water.

And we look at the ratio of adults to juveniles, to Nauplii, to cysts.

- [Kyle] So we've concentrated that cylinder of water down into about 400mls of water.

And that is our data.

And that'll give us a density of males, females, juveniles, Nauplii, which are the baby shrimp and their cysts (boat engine revving) - The brine shrimp harvest where they ship these brine shrimp eggs all over the world in the aquaculture business is the reason why Great Salt Lake connects us to the world.

If you were to buy farmed shrimp at a grocery store there could be anywhere between a 40 to 50% chance depending on the year, that you're indirectly eating Great Salt Lake brine shrimp, because those shrimp at the store were raised on Great Salt Lake brine shrimp.

- [Kyle] We're also tied to the rest of the world through bird migrations.

So we get anywhere from 4 and a half to 5 million Eared Grebes that come here.

We get anywhere from 10 to 12 million other migratory birds that migrate through the lake, utilize the food resources and then move on through Central and South America.

- I think it's surprising how much life there is in Great Salt Lake.

Just the biomass of shrimp and fly larva in the lake is amazing.

And then the sheer number of birds that we see on this lake is amazing too.

And I feel super lucky to be able to get out on the lake and see it, get out on airboat and see just the hundreds of thousands of different kind of shore birds.

It's always different and that's why I like coming out here.