Director of Artemia Research and Quality Control
Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp Cooperative
Bio:
Phil Brown is the Director of Artemia Research and Quality Control at the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp Cooperative. His educational background centers on limnology, freshwater ecology, and hydrology, with a BS from Utah State University and MS from Oregon State University. Phil began working on Great Salt Lake in 2008 with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources before joining the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp Cooperative in 2013. Over the past 17 years he has been directly involved in studying the open water ecosystem of Gilbert Bay, monitoring the annual brine shrimp (Artemia franciscana) population and the characteristics of the cysts it produces, understanding the use of Artemia in global aquaculture, and chronicling the salinities within Gilbert Bay and its deep brine layer, particularly as they have changed since the opening of the railroad causeway breach 9 years ago.
Title: Worth its Salt
Abstract: The direct effect of salinity on the ecology of Great Salt Lake has long been visible in broad strokes by the striking disparities present on each side of the lake’s causeways. Salinity is a powerful stressor and primary ecological driver which varies across the bays and oscillates in time with changes in lake volume. However, the opening of the breach in the mid-lake railroad causeway in December 2016 reminded me that the distribution of salt in the lake was far from static. Influential quantities of salt had moved between the lake’s largest bays in relatively short periods of time, partially decoupling lake elevation from salinity in Gilbert Bay and substantially changing the ecological viability of a given lake elevation. This realization occurred at a time of lowering lake elevations and rising salinities that for the first time in my career were threatening the brine shrimp, brine fly, and microbialite ecosystem within Gilbert Bay. Resource managers and scientists on the Salinity Advisory Committee have since employed a remarkable adaptive management strategy that has moved massive quantities of salt across the causeway and out of Gilbert Bay, thereby keeping salinities within the range crucial to maintaining the endemic pelagic ecosystem of the bay—even during the present period of low lake elevations.
