The Great Salt Lake occasionally smells strange during the summer and then there’s the “lake effect” in the winter. But within the waters of North America's most salty lake lies a unique variety of brine shrimp species that has spawned a rare public/private partnership between the Utah Department of Natural Resources and more than a dozen businesses. As we prepared to leave the Antelope Island marina, aquatics biologist Phil Brown laid out the basic plan for the day I was to spend with John Luft, the program manager of the Great Salt Lake Ecosystem and another aquatics biologist Jim Van Leeuwen. This operation is run within the Division of Wildlife Resources. Great Salt Lake brine shrimp eggs, known as cysts, are what this program is all about. There are as many as 17 shrimping companies quietly collecting millions of pounds of what they call raw harvest from the lake every week. This small team tells the industry when the harvest ends for the year by closely monitoring the biology of
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