How One Shrimp Used Its Survival Skills to Become Both Best-Selling Pet and Astronaut

A few years after humans first went to the Moon, Sea-Monkeys joined them.

Let’s get the disappointment out of the way first: Sea-Monkeys, despite advertising that may suggest otherwise, aren’t aquatic primates. They’re actually brine shrimp—small crustaceans in the order Anostraca that inhabit brine pools and other saline inland waters worldwide. Measuring up to 15 mm (0.6 inch) in length, their appearance is pinkish and unsettling: they have stalked compound eyes, leaflike limbs, and a slender abdomen that, without appendages, looks something like a tail. To swim, brine shrimp adopt an upside-down position and rhythmically beat their legs—which they also use to filter green algae, their primary food source.

Brine shrimp (especially the species Artemia salina, found in Utah’s Great Salt Lake) are known for their status as a popular feeding option for aquarium animals. Under their proper name, they are nowhere near as famous as their close relative the tardigrade, another small and strange-looking invertebrate that has garnered attention online for its long lifespan and near indestructibility. But it was the brine shrimp, under the name Sea-Monkey, that became a home aquarium pet designed to shock and amaze children by hatching in water. And it was brine shrimp that made it to the Moon.

(A quick disclaimer: though all Sea-Monkeys are brine shrimp, not all brine shrimp are Sea-Monkeys. Since a bulk order of novelty Sea-Monkey zoos is nowhere to be found in NASA’s archives, it’s safe to say that the agency sourced its own shrimp.)

In 1972, when Apollo 16 astronauts John W. Young and Charles M. Duke, Jr., set out to become the 9th and 10th men to Moon walk, brine shrimp traveled with them as part of the Biostack experiments—studies testing the effects of cosmic rays on bacteria spores, seeds, and brine shrimp eggs. The experiments were designed to provide insight into the possible effects of those rays on humans too, allowing NASA to better understand radiation’s effect on people in space.

By stacking spores, seeds, and shrimp between layers of radiation-sensitive materials, NASA could determine which subjects had been struck by cosmic rays. More than a hundred brine shrimp eggs were struck; when they returned to Earth, many still hatched, unharmed.

But Apollo 16 wasn’t the final NASA adventure for these hardy creatures. In 1991, brine shrimp eggs went into space again. This time the eggs—44 of them—were hatched onboard the space shuttle Atlantis, becoming some of the first animals born in space. Five shrimp survived and landed safely back on Earth.

Just as remarkable as the brine shrimp’s ability to survive outer space is its ability to come alive and hatch long after being deprived of water. Not only do brine shrimp live in aquatic habitats that have a higher concentration of salt than the ocean, but they must be able to withstand the drying-out of those habitats. In a healthful, hospitable environment, brine shrimp produce thin-shelled eggs, which hatch almost immediately after being released. But, in an environment deprived of water or nutrients, the shrimp produce hard-shelled eggs, or “cysts.” Inside the cysts, the larvae exist in anhydrobiosis, a deathlike state that allows them to survive with almost no water until conditions become favorable for hatching.

It’s these cysts that are sold as “Sea-Monkey eggs” and that survived a trip to the Moon. When the cysts are returned to water, the larvae rehydrate in a matter of hours and hatch—whether they’re in a novelty tank or a NASA lab.

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