I don't like to eat brine flies as much as I do brine shrimp. A lot of people don't like them, but they are very important to the Great Salt Lake in two ways. They eat a lot of algae and make the lake cleaner. They clean up as much stuff as a cleaning plant or factory would. They are eaten by a LOT of birds. Without the brine flies, there would not be much else.

Brine flies lay about 100 eggs at a time. They hatch into little things like worms called larva, kind of like this baby mosquito. The larva lives in the water until the it goes into a pupa case, kind of like a butterfly. When they are ready to become an adult, they take a ride in an air bubble and go on top of the water where they break out of the pupa case. The flies only live for about 3 or 4 days.

There are 3 kinds of flies on the Great Salt Lake. There are billions and billions of them in the spring and summer. Some people don't like to swim because there are so many, but they don't bite; they just go crunch crunch under your feet.

Some Native Americans used to eat the brine flies for snack food. MMMMM, I would have liked living around them.

Play the brine fly game
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