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grim first days of the Mormon settlement upon this inhospitable 

 land. As the story goes, a vast horde of large "crickets" (actually 

 grasshoppers) fell upon the first crops of these industrious people, 

 in numbers so great that they threatened to devour every leaf and 

 seed and stem. But the Mormons prayed and the gulls came, and 

 in fairly short order they gobbled up all the insects and the crops 

 were saved. This actually happened, and the gulls responsible 

 are now enshrined as the emblem of Utah. Yet gulls in a super- 

 briny lake in the middle of a continent, in one of its driest areas, 

 seem out of place and are a surprise to the uninitiated. 



The fish can also, in certain circumstances, provide us with 

 more than a little surprise. Among the almost innumerable lakes, 

 near-lakes, drying lakes, and almost ex-lakes of this baking 

 basin, a very high percentage contain fish. These are not special 

 fish; they are the same species that are found in surrounding 

 areas. They have not had time to alter their constitution or even 

 their bodily form to comply with the exceptional conditions in 

 which some of them now live. However, some of them seem to 

 have developed, or otherwise found it within themselves, to 



counter one of nature's most deadly traps and to survive in 

 conditions so extreme that it defies comprehension. 



There are animals — certain nematode worms — that live com- 

 fortably in vinegar or acetic acid; there are larvae of certain 

 flies that customarily flip about in petroleum; and there are crus- 

 taceans that live in almost saturated brines as in the Great Salt 

 Lake. In some places in the Great Basin there are dying lakes 

 that all but evaporate entirely in the summer, but these still con- 

 tain fish. As the water evaporates these fish must either die or 

 concentrate more and more into what is left of the water. This 

 some of them do; but they sometimes continue to do so until all 

 that is left of the water is little stagnant rills, often highly 

 alkaline, contained between bare rock, which during the hours 

 of direct sunlight may rise in temperature to as mudi as 175 

 degrees Fahrenheit (considerably above the point at which even 

 a human hand can be left submerged). It is stated that they 

 sometimes survive even greater temperatures, readiing very near 

 the boiling point of water. These fish have nowhere to go out of 

 the broiling sun, yet they survive. 



