Co-host Meisei Gonzalez interviews brine shrimper Jim Hopkins on the shore of Great Salt Lake.
Episode Description
Episode 7: Working Waterscape: Brine Shrimping is the first part of a two-part special exploring Great Salt Lake’s connections to local as well as global food systems. We imagine Great Salt Lake as a waterscape, with water at the center of this landscape. In this first part, we learn all about an industry very unique to Great Salt Lake – brineshrimping – through the eyes of three guests. Biologist Jaimi Butler tells us about her fascination with these briney creatures, while Tim Hawkes orients us to the Great Salt Lake Brine Cooperative, and Jim Hopkins shares salty stories from his 25-year career as a brine shrimper.
Below is a transcript for Episode 7 of Stay Salty: Lakefacing Stories. Listen to the episode on our Podcast page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your podcasts.
Episode Transcript
Jim Hopkins: One time I was out there in my harvest boat and the pilot really wanted to get one last set in. And by the time we got the net out, it was too late. And now it's four foot waves. And it was just a nightmare. And in fact, it was such a nightmare that my steering station was on top of the sleeping cabin. And it broke off with me in it, and it was sitting on the cab with nothing holding it on except a steering cable, and I thought I was gonna go in the drink. But somehow we survived. And I made it to shelter. But that was probably the scaredest I've ever been.
WAVE SOUNDS
Meisei Gonzalez: Yeah, you heard that right– four foot waves! Who knew she could get so ferocious. Another reason why i need to learn how to swim ASAP. If there's any swim instructor listening, hit me up haha. You have just heard a bit of my conversation with Jim Hopkins, a recently retired brine shrimper, sharing one of his scariest encounters from his time working on the lake.
MUSIC
Before talking with Jim, I had honestly no idea conditions on Great Salt Lake could get so dangerous. Today we’re sharing part one of a two-part episode on Great Salt Lake as a working landscape – or as we like to say, working waterscape. We’re going to dive into the diverse ways the lake and her waters contribute to our global food system — from brine shrimping to dairy farms.
But before we get into it – guess who’s in the studio!
The one, the only Olivia Juarez! If you’ve been listening to the pod, you’ve probably noticed us switched off narrating, but today we’re super excited to be coming back together in the studio to co-host this two-part episode.
Olivia Juarez: Woo so special, thank you Meisei. I’m very excited to hear what you learned from Jim out on Great Salt Lake; it sounds like it was such a beautiful time. I had the opportunity to listen to farmers and a scientist who guided the brine shrimp industry out in Cache Valley for this episode. It was incredible to learn about how deeply our food system is connected to the lake.
MG: This is honestly a perfect episode for us to both be on, because, remember when we were both thinking of getting brine shrimp tattoos? Which I’m still super down for [laughter].
OJ: Same! I’m so down if not trepidatious. It will be my first tat but I would rather not have it any other way.
When we first began exploring the topic for this episode we weren’t sure how to frame up the brine shrimping industry. Would it be extractive, like a minerals operation? And what would there be to learn from the experiences of brine shrimpers? We got the opportunity to find out, and learn from Timothy Hawkes that the Brine Shrimp Cooperative is in fact an agricultural cooperative and contributes immensely to our global food system.
Through brine shrimping, Great Salt Lake and her waters reach our dinner plates. Brine shrimp are fed to larger shrimp, like prawns, and other fish cultivated through aquaculture. Great Salt Lake contributes over 40% of the global supply of brine shrimp!
MG: In this episode of Stay Salty: Lakefacing Stories, we’ll talk about the ways the brine shrimp industry is adaptively managed to ensure a sustainable harvest and what it’s like harvesting the tiny crustaceans. I learned a lot, and I hope you will too.
OJ: We’re your hosts, Olivia Juarez
MG: and Meisei Gonzalez. You’re listening to Stay Salty: Lakefacing Stories.
THEME MUSIC
MG: To learn more about the nitty gritty of the brine shrimp industry—including your pet Sea Monkeys, I sat down with Timothy Hawkes.
Tim Hawkes: My name is Timothy Hawkes. I live in Centerville, Utah. I work full time for the Great Salt Lake Brine Shrimp Cooperative where I'm a board chair and General Counsel. And then I wear a lot of other hats on things relating to the lake. I chair the Great Salt Lake Advisory Council, that's a position appointed by the governor. I serve on a lot of different boards and commissions that relate to the lake, and I founded a group not too long ago called the Great Salt Lake Business Council.
The lake touches me in a lot of different ways. Where I live in Centerville, if you walk a little bit uphill from our house, and we often do just to see the sunset, you see amazing sunsets off the lake. It's really extraordinary for sunsets. And then my work really puts me in touch with the lake in really extraordinary ways. So been out to see the lake, I’ve flown over the lake. I've been on boats on the lake and you know, just really been able to experience in some unique ways. And where I work, which is kind of West Ogden, depending on what the weather's doing, like if the summer thunderstorm rolls in, you can actually smell the lake, and it's not an unpleasant – it's not like a stinky smell, it’s kind of a briny smell like you get from the ocean. And then even the brine shrimp eggs themselves: we store a lot of those and if you walk into our freezers or our processing plant, there's a very distinctive smell. Some people find it kind of stinky, I just think it sort of fades to the background, but it is kind of a briny smell. And you can touch and you can taste the lake. I like to tell people, we touch, taste and feel the lake in so many different ways people have no idea. They realize when they pick up their cell phone, it probably has magnesium from the Great Salt Lake, if they pick up a soda can, the same. If you eat almonds, they were probably fertilized with sulfate of potash from the lake. It's a fertilizer that's derived from the lake. Titanium comes out of the lake. And shrimp, of course. If you eat shrimp at a restaurant or you buy it at a Costco or something like that, it very likely ate brine shrimp from Great Salt Lake when it was small. And of course if you ski on snow, it came off the lake, so there's just so many different ways it's tied to our air, our water, our food and so many other aspects of our life that I think we don't always recognize.
MG: Tim began working for the Brine Shrimp Cooperative eight years ago. Prior to that, he was a member of the Utah State Legislature and also worked on water law and trout habitat conservation in the state.
TH: So my daughter likes to say I'm moving down the food chain: I went from fish to fish food. And she speculates that maybe algae may be in my future. But that’s how I got involved, it was really accidental, I never – I mean I sort of tell people, nobody in your wildest dreams would wake up saying I want to be a sea monkey lawyer, but I somehow managed to pull it off.
MG: Honestly, I’m manifesting algae in Tim’s future, because I bet it would be just as interesting as brine shrimp. Like talking with Tim, we quickly started to nerd out about the process of brine shrimping and their importance to our ecosystem.
TH: Brine shrimp are these amazing critters, right? They're super durable and these cysts, basically a mother brine shrimp, can produce live young or cysts. And the brine shrimp can respond to environmental cues to know which to do, so if they feel any stress – so if there's not enough food, or the temperatures could be too hot, or maybe too cold, or other environmental stressors – then they will switch over to producing these cysts. And what they found is that – and the cysts are neutrally buoyant – certain times of the year, particularly in the fall when the population is starting to die off, they release these massive amounts of cysts. And when they're neutrally buoyant, they sort of stick together and so they come up to the surface in these streaks. You can actually see them from airplanes, sometimes if you're flying over Great Salt Lake in a commercial airline and you look down you might see a little brown or reddish colored streak. In many cases, those are brine shrimp cysts that have come up to the surface and what they found is that if you could capture those, and then you mix them in a little saltwater, the baby brine shrimp will hatch right out of them. That turned out to have enormous commercial value when it comes to farm raised shrimp and fish, certain types of fish, marine fish, like seabass and seabream. It's actually indispensable. So you can't farm raise shrimp and you can't farm raise these species that are really popular in Europe, you can't do it without brine shrimp. They've tried and tried and tried to find ways around it. They can't find it.
MG: Did you know that brine shrimping started at the Great Salt Lake in the 1950s? At that time, brine shrimpers were harvesting adult brine shrimp to feed the sea life in aquariums. Eventually, they realized the cysts (or eggs) of the brine shrimp were really where the money was at. And as the industry grew, companies thought it would benefit them to unite under one entity.
TH: The cooperative is a bunch of brine shrimp companies that got together to cooperate. So until the late 1990s, the Great Salt Lake was the sole source of brine shrimp cysts in the world. Then we had a couple of years where very little came off Great Salt Lake, and of course now you have these industries, these shrimp farms that are reliant on Artemia and have no other way to figure it out how to do it and that sent people scurrying all over the world looking for alternative sources. They found them in Russia and Siberia. And in China like Xinjiang. And so that's where they found these alternate sources. And these are countries with no environmental restrictions, where they pay people 40 cents a day. And so it quickly became clear that if the industry around Great Salt Lake didn't start working together, they wouldn't be viable. And so they banded together and formed a cooperative. All these companies except one, something like 16 companies banded together, and so they worked together to harvest, process and sell the Artemia that comes off in Great Salt Lake. So that's a little bit detailed. But that's the history of the industry, it dates back to the 1950s. And today it's not a huge industry, but it probably provides three to 400 jobs a year. And we export to 55 different countries around the world. And it's the one way that the lake touches the world more than any other way. For birds, the Great Salt Lake has really hemispheric importance. When we talk about Artemia, suddenly – I've seen Great Salt Lake Artemia in Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, you know, all these different places around the world.
Many, many million tons of seafood production rely on brine shrimp from the Great Salt Lake. And those estimates, you know, it's 5 million to 10 million metric tons, but it's a big chunk of total seafood production relies on brine shrimp from the Great Salt Lake. So there would be kind of a global impact if you didn't have that resource really to rely on.
MG: One thing I realized when talking with Tim is how the crisis at Great Salt Lake won’t only impact us humans who live in her watershed, or the millions of migratory birds who visit her shores, but also humans around the globe who rely on brine shrimp from Great Salt Lake for their livelihoods.
TH: I've had this happen – you're talking to a small like Mom and Pop shrimp hatchery in Indonesia. And this is somebody that's never been outside of Indonesia, they ask about Great Salt Lake, how’s Great Salt Lake going. I heard about something you know, like maybe Great Salt Lake wasn't doing so well. You know, what can you tell me? So again, it's really an interesting way that Great Salt Lake touches the world.
You look globally, a lot of people's livelihoods are depending on Great Salt Lake so it's not just three to 400 local jobs. I don't know how many jobs it is, but my guess is it's tens of thousands of jobs at least spread all over the world. Small communities, Mom and Pop, you know, kind of family run businesses are reliant and depend on that lake. And that hopefully makes us feel sort of a deeper level of responsibility because it's not just right here. It's going back, you know, it's a small hatchery in Indonesia, you know, that relies on this input; they could not be in business if they didn't have access to brine shrimp. So that helps me feel like where this is, we really have kind of a global responsibility here to help feed a hungry and growing world and to use a really sustainable healthy resource to do it with. Great Salt Lake is the only inland fishery that's been certified as sustainable in the world by the Marine Fishery Stewardship Council because they came in they're like, wow, this is amazing. You know, this whole story of not only you're doing it sort of sustainably but it's actually potentially beneficial for the resource; that was really kind of a unique story for them.
MG: We all know Utah is not necessarily known for regulations, but brine shrimping has actually been proactively managed by the state.
TH: Fascinating industry, it actually went to the state at some point and said we need to be regulated. We want to work with you in partnership and figure out how to regulate this industry. The state took the attitude that it's an inexhaustible resource. Well, the fishermen that were doing the harvesting said there's no such thing as an inexhaustible resource. So let's work together, and they came up with this really innovative system where the industry works with the state, where they’re really trying to harvest the excess cysts in the system. So it sounds funny, but you’d think if you're pulling eggs out of the system, you're competing with the birds, right? And it's like somehow competitive. It really looks like it's more symbiotic. Because we're pulling out the excess cysts. And by doing that, you actually, if you look over time since that management model was put into place, the average number of cysts per year is actually going up. So that's good for the brine shrimp population. That's good for our industry, certainly, but it's also good for all the tens of millions of migratory birds that rely on this resource. Effectively, what you're doing is you're sort of smoothing out the natural peaks and valleys, so less boom, less bust. But what that means for birds is it's a more reliable stop on their annual migration and so it's really kind of an interesting industry.
MUSIC
MG: Olivia also talked with the one and only Jaimi Butler to better understand how the state came to manage the brine shrimp industry in an adaptive and sustainable way. So Olivia, spill the tea – by the way I gotta say I am a huge fan of Jaimi’s work.
OJ: She’s a living legend and Jaimi has developed a wealth of knowledge about the lake. She has been working with Great Salt Lake for 25 years in a variety of roles, from coordinator of Westminster’s Great Salt Lake Institute, to most recently farming in Wellsville in the Bear River watershed. Early in her career she worked as a scientist for the brine shrimp industry when the state was trying to figure out, how do you manage a sustainable harvest. Her career has practically been written in the stars since her childhood.
Jaimi Butler:So I met Great Salt Lake when it was at its highest levels. And I was a young person, maybe almost a teenager. I lived in Murray, Utah, and my dad took me out in his little, like, 1970 blue, rusty Chevette and I think he, I mean, I think everybody thought that the lake was going to flood everything. It was at its highest level ever recorded in history. It was, you know, swallowing up farms. It was, you know, devouring roads. The lake was very vilified then like I purposefully use those words because it was very vilified, like, the lake is trying to consume the Salt Lake Valley. And, you know, I think – he drove us out on I-80, and I think everybody thought that I mean, I-80 was like, almost underwater during that time. And I remember just standing on the side of the road, like plunking rocks into the water, you didn't have to throw them, you didn't have to slingshot them. We were literally– the water was lapping on I-80 and you could see Black Rock and waves crashing over Black Rock.
WATER LAPPING SOUNDS
And so I met it at this really high time. And I didn't really think about it after that, like it wasn't something that my family or very many families near us would visit the lake. And so I didn't really think about it or experience it again until after college, and I had gotten a degree in wildlife management from Utah State University. And the first job I got out of college was working for Utah State and helping on a project with these little birds called eared grebes. And these eared grebes the – you know, over 95% of their population, world's population, comes to Great Salt Lake every year to feed almost exclusively on brine shrimp. But there was this industry that harvest the eggs of brine shrimp off of the surface of the water and so state managers wanted to know if brine shrimpers were taking too much shrimp.
OJ: If you don’t know what an eared grebe looks like, look it up. On YouTube if you can. They have beautifully colored, shapely plumage. And piercing bright red eyes. Super metal.
JB: It's a cool story because it was kind of everybody, you know conservation groups were worried about eared grebes; there were you know, brine shrimpers are also worried. They are harvesting the same things that eared grebes are harvesting. And if their resource isn’t healthy, that means a decline in their industry and in the economic benefits of that industry. And, you know, the state has a responsibility to manage and conserve wildlife for all Utahns.
The brine shrimp industry is a model for adaptive resource management, not just in Utah, but across the world. It's something that we really, you know, haven't experienced in other places. And this was like, developed at Great Salt Lake with cooperation of state agencies, and academia and conservation groups. They really work together. And during that time, like we created this model for natural resource management that's done adaptively based on what's in Great Salt Lake; we can adapt what we are doing to help both brine shrimp and birds.
MG: As a graduate student at Utah State, Jaimi and her team conducted groundbreaking research on eared grebes and brine shrimp, showing that these little crustaceans are not only critical to our global food system but also the food chain at Great Salt Lake.
JB: What happens is, eared grebes, they come to Great Salt Lake and they just start gorging on brine shrimp and their digestive system, I mean, it, like, doubles in size. And at the same time, they molt, so they molt all of their feathers, and they can't fly anymore. And they just get really, really, really, really fat and they can't fly anymore. And so they're, you know, they're diving to get all of these brine shrimp. The work that we did at Utah State, we found out that those little eared grebes, when they're on Great Salt Lake, they have to capture two shrimp every second that they're feeding. And they do it with this little tiny pointed beak one at a time. And every day that they're feeding, while they're here, they need to capture 22 to 30,000 brine shrimp, just you know, to stay alive, to reproduce, to gain weight. And so we were using this, you know, unique situation where these little fat birds that couldn't fly, we were using this gill net to capture them. And then we would study their oxygen consumption to understand how many calories a day they needed to eat. And that took a lot of time, like it was, you know, a very ambitious study on the metabolic rate and the requirements of eared grebes that happened here. That was really cool.
OJ: Around that time, Jaimi was recruited by the Utah brine shrimp industry to be their lead biologist.
JB: I actually was crazy enough to join the brine shrimp industry, so when I was working at Utah State, you know, they saw me. I always love the logistics behind field biology. It’s always been funny. So to measure the metabolic rate of eared grebes, I would sit on the dock at Antelope Island with, like, a big stack of like equipment. I had this like rainbow umbrella that kind of looked like a taco stand. That's what some people were like, ‘Why are you at the taco stand?’ And I would sit my days out there, like measuring the oxygen consumption from the dock. And I met a lot of people while I was out there. And at the time, you know, that was in 1999. And the lake levels were actually, like, pretty high in 1999. And I started getting to know these brine shrimpers, who actually really, I think taught me more about Great Salt Lake than most everybody because they understood the ecosystem and had been out there for 20 years watching. So at the time brine shrimp population started to decrease, and it was kind of supposed by a lot of people that it had to do with those brine shrimp harvesters that must have been overharvesting. So I asked them about it, you know, because I'm sitting there, and I'm talking to ‘em. And I asked him, and my friend Mark Jensen was like, oh, no, no, no, no, like, we're gonna sit here and talk about this. And he knew it was, the lake levels were really high. And that decreased the salt content in the water of Great Salt Lake. And that resulting decrease in the salt content was not optimal for brine shrimp, or the food that they ate. And so, you know, he kind of knew, you know, this is something that will, you know, won't last forever.
MG: As we all know, the high water level and low salinity didn’t last forever. Now, as the lake recedes, scientists are worried about the opposite issue: salinity levels spiking and brine shrimp populations plummeting.
JB: I got to know a lot of those folks. Eventually, I was hired for the brine shrimp industry as their biologist to track the population dynamics of brine shrimp in Great Salt Lake..
The cool thing was I worked right next to like State Division of Wildlife employees during that time. And, you know, we worked very collaboratively to understand, like, the methodology of counting how many brine shrimp are in Great Salt Lake because that's really, really, really, really hard. And nobody had done it before, like the state of Utah, the Division of Wildlife Resources, and the Great Salt Lake Ecosystem Program, together with the brine shrimp industry, really formed this really sustainable industry that actually optimizes how many brine shrimp are in Great Salt Lake to benefit both birds and humans.
So it was this, like, really cool fun time; the industry was so fun to work with. So the way the brine shrimp are managed is the state counts how many brine shrimp cysts are left in Great Salt Lake, and there's a cut off: they want to see at the end of December, 21 cysts per liter of water in Great Salt Lake. And to understand what that number is, you have to go out once or twice a week; it's you know, 75 or 100 miles in a boat and you sample 12 to 17 sights on the lake and then you like average that all together and so – I mean, it's really hard, and it's very, like, labor intensive, and it takes, like, pretty specialized equipment and knowledge to have a boat not rust apart on the lake and to have people to fix it and to understand where shallow reefs are and all of that. But it was great because I was on the water once or twice a week. I mean, the industry has really been, in my opinion, you know, they are out there more than anybody. And they have, like, so much understanding of both the ecology of the lake and just like the hard logistics of the lake.
OJ: The brine shrimp industry is quite male-dominated, so I asked Jaimi about her experience as a woman.
JB: I have always been bewildered by the fact that I did not experience a lot of like, of the normal things that you see as a woman in a male dominated place – and a male dominated place that has where folks have been there for a long time. You know, a lot of these brine shrimp harvesters have been there for, I mean, decades.
I was pregnant at the time when I started working for them, which was, you know, really cool. I went to them and I said, Look, I didn't know that I was going to be pregnant. And I don't know what it's going to be like, and like, I'll resign. I had been – I don't even think I had started my first day. I like to think they just thought I was really cool. Maybe they thought I would sue them if they didn't hire me which I wouldn’t have, I didn't know how it was gonna go. It turned out really great. I was pregnant the whole time that I was on Great Salt Lake. It's like, really, really hard to pee off of a boat when you have a big pregnant belly. And I mean, from that time on, I didn't feel anything other than like, respect. Like the guys would call me on the radio. And they, they called me Dr. J. And I'm not a doctor, but I was called Dr. J. And they would ask me, like, “hey, what's the shrimp count?” Or they would ask me, I mean, they knew I loved all parts of the lake. And so I would get text messages about “what's this thing? Or what is that?” And I mean, the brine shrimpers taught me how to drive a boat in Great Salt Lake. They were endlessly patient with the ridiculous things that I have wrecked on boats, and they always helped me. I can always go to them. See, the brine shrimp industry has full-time like aluminum fabricators that help make all of the boats work, you know, it's a constant maintenance. And I could go to them and say, I need this weird little device thingy so that I can do whatever it is, and they would make it. Everybody was so helpful.
MUSIC INTERLUDE
MG: To learn more, I got the chance to talk with one of those helpful brine shrimpers Jaimi used to work with, Jim Hopkins, who recently retired from a long career as a brine shrimper. He’s the one who faced those 4-foot waves we mentioned in the beginning of this episode!
JH: Well, I moved to Utah 37 years ago and started on the lake, Great Salt Lake, 25 years ago, and retired from it last year. So it was a nice 25-year career. I really loved it.
MG: This interview was a lot of fun; we actually did it on the shores of Great Salt Lake, so you may hear a squawk here and there and some wind. But honestly I wish you could have seen the views.
JH: Every one of my coworkers agree that the best sunrises and sunsets that any of us have ever seen, and most of the people I work with are world travelers, they've been every – all kinds of places. For some reason, there's seven mountain ranges that surround the Great Salt Lake, and when the clouds are just right, that sun comes up underneath it and reflects off the lake and it's Mirror Pond. It just lights up the whole sky. And everybody just stops sometimes in the morning and goes, alright, let's take a 10-second break from the radio and let's just enjoy this moment of vividness. It's just incredible. I mean, you don't even have to be out in a boat. You could drive out to the Great Salt Lake Marina, or Antelope Island at sunrise or sunset or even the Spiral Jetty. There's a lot of great viewing points. And it's just a magic moment. It's just, It doesn't always happen. But when it does, it's a magic moment.
MG: Beyond the magic moments, Jim really put me in his shoes and helped me realize that brine shrimping is a pretty hardcore job.
JH: So we'd go out on the Great Salt Lake and the brine shrimp would lay the egg and they would come to the surface in a big bloom and it would look like a big mud slick. And we'd contain it the same way you clean up an oil spill. So we had an oil containment boom. Anywhere from a thousand to two thousand feet with a boat on one end, and the skiff on the other, and would lay that boom out, circle it up, cinch it down and pump it on board. And then we'd go deliver it to a barge which had a crane that would lift these two thousand pound bags off. And on a bad set you catch 500 pounds; on a good set you catch 50,000 pounds. And we could catch several hundred thousand pounds and more in a day.
We start as early as four in the morning, and fish start in the dark and work. And we have to have calm weather. When it gets rough, the egg sinks and we can't harvest it. If it gets really rough, we come off the water, let the storm do its thing. Otherwise, we just kind of hang out, wait for the morning winds to subside and then go back to work. But, we also you know, when it's busy, and we work late into the night, we just, when we're done loading our product out of the barge, we just go find a calm spot, throw an anchor and go to bed right on the water, sleep on our boats. And sometimes we'll stay out there and be on the water for two weeks straight without touching dry land.
It can be a grind. And you know, during a long stretch, a high pressure week, we can work two to three weeks straight on through, 18 hours a day.
MG: So definitely get the whole everything with Great Salt Lake. You get to hear it, smell it, touch it [laughter].
JH: Well, another thing you don't realize out here is there's more than 10 million birds that use the Great Salt Lake as habitat. In the fall the grebes, the eared grebes, come in, and there’s 6 million grebes. And they come in here, molt their feathers, and spend about two months regrowing those feathers and fatten it up for the big fly out of here. And so when they're out there, it's just incredible – you'll drive your boat from one end of the lake to the other and it's nothing but grebes. And the phalarope is a beautiful bird. It's a white and gray bird. And they fly in the big flocks together, and when they turn sideways, they go white, grey. It's like a cloud flying in the sky. It's just an amazing nature site.
MG: I gotta say I'm a little, like, scared of birds. So I think that would be a little bit of –
JH: They're little birds.
MG: You know, like have you seen that movie, the bird, I can't remember that like scary one –
JH: Alfred Hitchcock!
MG: Something like that, that's what I think of, just like this swarm of birds at Great Salt Lake.
JH: Yeah, these are friendly birds, lots of seagulls, too. One of my favorite things to do is feed the seagulls. So, but you know, also we get caught in storms out there and that's the low light, that's – you really take a beating out there because the water is so hard and the span of the waves is really close together, the period, so we try to get off the water before the storm hits but sometimes we don't always make it, and in fact one time I was out there in my harvest boat and the pilot really wants to get one last set in. And by the time we got the net out, it was too late. And now it's four foot waves. And it was just a nightmare. And in fact, it was such a nightmare that my steering station was on top of the sleeping cabin. And it broke off with me in it, and it was sitting on the cab with nothing holding it on except a steering cables, and I thought I was gonna go in the drink. But somehow we survived. And I made it to shelter. But that was probably the scariest I've ever been.
MG: And that's something I didn't even, like, realize how, I guess, I don’t want to say dangerous, but aggressive the lake can be right during storms because it looks so calm from an outsider perspective. Like I see it and I don’t think of these waves, like what you described sounds like the ocean.
JH: It gets ferocious for sure. And also, another thing people don't realize is in the winter, it gets really cold, like the water gets down to 24. And it actually does freeze, the fresh water from the rivers pools on top. And so we have these gigantic ice sheets, like for six, eight miles will come out and you'll be driving right through a sheet of ice. And it's really loud. You can't hear anybody talking on the radio. And so you have to just get through it and get into open water. But yeah, I actually stood on the Great Salt Lake, as a frozen ice sheet one time.
MG: Whoa, that’s really cool.
JH: But you don't want to fall into into it because you got about five minutes before you're done. You know, it'll incapacitate you very quickly.
SOUNDS OF WAVES
JH: So another good story I have is we have a harbor at Promontory Point. And next to that is Fremont Island, which used to be a private game reserve that the people that owned it would take wild bison and buffalo and wild boars and stock them on the island for hunters to come and shoot them. Well, one day, they're loading up some of the wild boars into the barge to bring them over to the island and two of them escaped in our harbor. And I worked with this guy that was an authentic Mexican cowboy. So he immediately formed a lasso and goes after this wild boar and he got it on the first try, bam, hands it off to the ranchers. The other one sees that and he's like, I'm not having that. So he swims out across the harbor, gets out on the jetty. Now he's corded out there and he's like, I'm going big, and so he dives into the water. Dives in the water, starts swimming for the deep end, the Great Salt Lake, so I get Arturo on the bow of my boat and we go out of the harbor. And we're trying to lasso this wild boar while we're on the Great Salt Lake, and by God he got that boar and we brought him back on the boat and he was going crazy. But we got him back to the ranchers and so we were the only ones to ever catch wild boar in the Great Salt Lake.
MG: That’s definitely a story I would brag to everyone about if that’s what I got to do.
JH: Yeah, it’s a funny story.
MG: But I can just imagine like the cowboy because when you said Mexican Cowboy, I just thought of my parents instantly. And I was like, they just, the lasso was out and ready.
JH: Yeah, instantly, I was so impressed.
MG: That is really funny – well, I'd like to know a little bit more about kind of the industry side of the Great Salt Lake. You know, you mentioned a little bit how everything works. What are some of the kind of new concerns or maybe concerns you've always had with what's been going on with the Great Salt Lake?
JH: Well, the lake level drop means that increasing salinity and the increase in salinity was putting the brine shrimp out of their comfort zone. So last, this last winter, before, two years ago, I guess, the harvest was very low, and the brine shrimp were stressed, they were laying less eggs. And there was some serious concern about the dust and all the other aspects of the lower Salt Lake levels. But we got some water last year, it came back up, and the harvest was also way back up. So the people were psyched. And the industry is still going strong. So I think we're doing good business.
MG: Tim Hawkes really drove home for us the connection between the health of the lake and the brine shrimp industry.
MG: What does the lake mean for the brine shrimp cooperative as a whole?
TH: Let me just say it's essential, right? So without the brine shrimp resource, we don’t have a business. And I will say from an advocacy standpoint, it is kind of an interesting role to be in. One of things I really love is that the health of our industry is tied directly to the health of the ecosystem. There's no gap at all. So you might have an industry that's kind of competing, right? But ours doesn't and, and it actually – might actually be kind of a symbiotic relationship. And so I can go out there and advocate forcefully for the health of the lake, because that's what we need, we need a healthy, resilient, sustainable ecosystem. And that's very much in the interest of our industry as well. So it's a really nice platform to talk about the lake and to advocate for the lake. And that's why we're allies with anybody that cares about the lake is an ally to the industry, because we need everybody working together to solve a really tough problem.
MG: From these conversations, Olivia and I learned so much about brine shrimping, the role it plays in our global food systems, the force it is for stewarding the ecosystem, and the way the management of the industry may serve as a model for other industries going forward. To close us out, we want to share one final note from Tim that may change how you look at the lake next time you fly over it.
MUSIC IN BACKGROUND
TH: I tell people if you are flying over Great Salt Lake and you look down, you'll know kind of where you're out in the lake by the color of the water. So if you look down and it's pink lemonade color or kind of a dull reddish you know you're in the north arm, there's no brine shrimp up there. There's just these extremophile bacterias that have that really red coloring and that's what colors the water. If you look down in the south side of the lake, it's every shade of green and blue imaginable and the color that it is says where it's at in its cycle. So if the lake is blue, it's in a brine shrimp dominant phase. So brine shrimp are these super efficient grazers. And so it's interesting, in the winter all the brine shrimp die, and so if you go out there in like February the water is going to be kind of pea green. And so if you look down and the water’s kind of pea green, you know south arm right? And that's because there's no brine shrimp and there's all of this algae. When the brine shrimp hatch out, they'll graze it all down, and so visibility will go from like a half and half an inch maybe to 20 feet, you can see all the way to the bottom. And now the lake goes blue. And so we have some really interesting drone footage that's been taken by our fishermen – so they go up high and they look down and the colors will blow your mind. I mean, it's the red of the brine shrimp’s cysts, it’s almost like bloom coming off of this really crazy greenish colored background. And then the next frame, you can see all the way to the bottom so you can see the bio herms and they have their own little fibrous kind of textures running along the bottom and then you can see suspended above it these little skiffs of brine shrimp and boats sort of crossing. It's really amazing.
OJ: This was part one of a two-part special on Great Salt Lake and our food system. In part two, we hear from the stewards of Steep Mountain Farm where they manage a regenerative farm bordered by the Little Bear River, and other nearby farmers in Cache Valley.
MG: If you like what you’re hearing, leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
THEME MUSIC
MG: Stay Salty: Lakefacing Stories is an “Of Salt and Sand” production. We explore what it means to stay in Utah through economic transition and climate crisis by producing multimedia projects with, by, and for impacted communities.
OJ: The Producers are Maria Archibald, Amelia Diehl, and Brooke Larsen. Podcast cover art is by Frances Ngo. Our Visual Director is Jeri Gravlin. Ashley Finley and Katherine Quaid are our Event Curators. Music is by Amelia Diehl. We’re your hosts Olivia Juarez
MG: and Meisei Gonzalez.
This project is funded by grants and foundations which you can find on our website. We wanna start shouting out some of our donors, and today we thank Elizabeth Ferlic and Tripp Hopkins. Please join them in supporting our work by donating at lakefacing.org. You can learn more about the podcast on our website and on instagram @OfSaltAndSand. Until next time…
MG, OJ: Stay Salty!
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