This is Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Christopher and Dalyata.

If there's one thing that unites a lot of the creatures that live in vernal pools,

it's their extreme lifestyle.

They have a very distinctive strategy, a few months ago, a wildlife biologist named Chuck

Black, took me out to see some vernal pools at a marine base outside San Diego.

Vernal pools are these temporary little ponds that form when it rains, and they turn into

these little oasis that are home to a whole bunch of different creatures, most iconic of

which is the ferry shrimp.

They don't have any spines or defensive mechanisms, they're kind of like lunch for anything

that comes along beetles or birds or anything.

They're very fast to reproduce, so the shrimp strategy is to start fast, get your reproduction

done.

It kind of reminds me of those just ad water toys, as a kid, if you remember those.

It's like the rain comes, it fills up these pools, and it sort of activates the ferry

shrimp eggs that have been sitting there for who knows how long.

The ferry shrimp then grow as fast as they can, they reproduce, they put out their own

eggs, and then those eggs just sit there for a while, enduring droughts or fire until

the next time it rains, and that could be decades.

Even a hundred years from now, so it's sort of like a live fast dye young.

Yeah, it's exactly.

And while ferry shrimp are sort of the rock stars of the vernal pools, the life there

goes way beyond ferry shrimp.

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