Essays

Somewhere in California's Central Valley there is an official-looking sign saying "Keep Out", which draws attention to a hole in the ground, a mere shallow depression in the terrain that otherwise would be very easy to overlook. The depression is the habitat of an amazing species, older than the dinosaurs, much more alien than Yoda, hardier than head lice and yet on the endangered species list, challenging our very notions of time and continuity. Though no water is in sight, the species in question is the fairy shrimp, an inch-long crustacean. On occasion, the depression fills with rain water, forming a pond, which quickly evaporates. These ephemeral ponds, called vernal ponds, are well-suited to the life cycle of the fairy shrimp. The female fairy shrimp lays eggs, which sink into the sediments at the bottom of the pond, where they can survive many years of drought. In fact, drying out is a necessary step in their development. When the depression fills up with water, the eggs hatch quickly, the creatures mature, mate, lay eggs and die, within about 3 weeks. Then the pond dries out and the cycle repeats. The beauty of this arrangement for the fairy shrimp is that there are no fish to eat them, only birds. This remarkable niche has allowed fairy shrimp to survive some 250 million years, and the species is now endangered not because of drought or climate change or natural enemies, but because modern man has been quick to wipe out habitats that are breeding grounds for mosquitoes.

From our perspective, the fairy shrimp lives in harsh, arid conditions. It lives a pulsed existence, with no contact across generations, no way to teach their offspring clever behaviors picked up in 15 full days of swimming, a better backstroke perhaps, or a good recipe for plankton, or how to recognize the shadow of a duck swimming overhead. For that, they would need a written language, something in addition to the DNA passed on to their offspring.

I say we can't imagine life without culture, life without a civilization passed on from generation to generation. Civilization is what gives us our lives.

But I say we can imagine what a fairy shrimp written civilization might look like, what messages a fairy shrimp scribe might choose to impress into little clay tablets. There wouldn't be anything about drought, nothing about ephemeral ponds - for them drought wouldn't exist, the time in between full ponds wouldn't exist. In fairy shrimp culture, the ducks are always dangerous, the food is always plentiful, the swimming always good, the water always wet and cool. If they strung together all their written experiences into some kind of history, it would be one continuous history of swimming!