New species found in Great Salt Lake changes what we know about its ecosystem

Michael Werner was one of the many Utah residents who fled to the state’s sprawling parks and public lands in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic led to shutdowns of gathering places all over the state, leaving very few activities available outside of home.

He had just started his job as an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Utah and decided to take up hiking after the pandemic closed the university’s lab for months on end. That led him to Antelope Island, where he stumbled across educational signage teaching visitors that brine shrimp and brine flies are the only species living in the Great Salt Lake because of its unique saline ecosystem.

Being an expert on nematodes, he wondered if that was true.

Nematodes, otherwise known as roundworms, are one of the world’s most abundant animal classifications. There are more than 250,000 known nematode species, including in the deep ocean, arid climates and anything and everything in between.

“Nematodes are a nearly ubiquitous group of organisms found in all sorts of environments. Some of those environments are very extreme,” he said, recalling that day almost four years ago. “So I thought, ‘Maybe nobody has taken a close look?’”

Werner consulted with Bonnie Baxter at Westminster University and Byron Adams at Brigham Young University.

Nematodes especially adapted to hypersaline conditions were found associated with microbial organisms. The Great Salt Lake has a flourishing microbial community but the only multicellular organisms that hypersaline bays were previously thought to support were brine shrimp and brine fly larvae.  The nematodes inhabit reef-like organosedimentary structures called microbialites. The microbialites are built by bacteria.

The nematodes in the hypersaline regions of the Great Salt Lake feed on bacteria are in the family Monhysteridae which includes genera that are the dominant fauna of the ocaen abyssal zone and deep-sea hydrothermal vents. The bacteria supporting the nematode populartion include photosynthetic and chemoautotrophic organisms.organisms. Gilbert Bay in which the nematodes were studied water of up to 20% salinity.  Nematodes wwere extracted from the saline water using sucrose-density centrifugation.