Travel Photography > Great Basin > Mono Lake, California

Before they assimilated, the Kutzadika'a, relatives of the Paiute tribes of Central California, harvested the alkali fly pupae for breakfast. Pretty unpleasant, I thought when I poked at the soupy legions of fly eggs. But then again how bad can California desert kaviar be after seeing a head cheese, or pickled pigs feet? I consulted Leviticus, on any biblical rationale against pupae fly, but couldn't find it.

While the Kutzadika'a feed on the pupae of the fly, the fly and freshwater brine shrimp - six trillion of brine shrimp feed on seasonal algae, which feed off the desert bacteria of this lake, Lake Mono, which fits on the western edge of the Great Basin Desert, under Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada Mountain range.

The brine shrimp, of the species Artemia monica are unique to the lake. Up close, they look like space aliens. The fact that they can lie dormant for years caused one clever company to sell them to children, as sea monkeys.

The algae blooms, the shrimp and the flies feed on the algae, the phalaropes - shorebirds - feed on the shrimp and the flies on their way to South America. The ones that don't make it, the ones that plop dead in the lake, well they turn to stone, but more on that later. It is a simple ecosystem; and though we often call ecosystems fragile, it is hardly that, for it has lasted millennia, pretty much this way, in a so-called free market of biology, unencumbered by the influence of external pressure.

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