Crustacean has never been seen away from Lake Merritt, but it’s not from Oakland

You can go down today to the notch in the heart-shaped Lake Merritt, slide down the embankment through the overgrown Australian myrtle trees to the edge of what Carlton calls the “black mayonnaise” lake mud, pick through the shoreline marine debris and find the hoppers. In the absence of such proof, and based on the fact that as far as anyone knows the hopper only lives on this one small beach on Lake Merritt, one of Carlton’s colleagues at the Smithsonian once considered briefly the idea of listing it as endangered. “In a deeply urbanized place in California, with millions of people, and all the activity in Lake Merritt, and all the storms, and all the tidal control, and all those perturbations, this little sandy muddy beach under the gardens and trees of Lakeside Park is there, largely unexplored,” Carlton says.

Source: baynature.org