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"The Shrine Shrimp Amphipod (Jesogammarus acalceolus)"
Novelecology.com
"One thousand, two hundred and seventeen years ago, upon the slope of a volcano in the Aomori prefecture of Japan, a shrine was built. Beside that shrine, a small pool was made from a natural spring, providing a water source for visitors and their horses. These features would be cared for and maintained by generations of Shinto practitioners for hundreds of years, all the way to the modern day, and in doing so they provided an extraordinary sanctuary. Those conservators were unknowingly protecting a tiny crustacean, kept safe in that pool while the landscape changed around them. Today, those few square metres of water are the only place in all the world that the amphipod is known to live, since the researchers discovered it to be a unique species. They diagnosed it based on its lack of a calceolus, a part of the antenna involved in sensing when the females are ready to lay (and get laid), and named it Jesogammarus acalceolus. I prefer to call it the shrine shrimp, even if it's not strictly a shrimp at all."
Miles Kitching
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