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CDRI Desert NewsFlash
November 2025
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Students from Texas Tech University enjoyed early fall at CDRI.
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Fall update at CDRI
We have enjoyed one extremely busy, yet fun month in October! We hosted the Roger Conant Distinguished Guest Lecture with Kerry Griffis-Kyle on October 9.
We also hosted our free educational programs, The Earth Rocks and Herps Day. Both required extensive setup, advanced planning, and coordination with all parties involved. And that planning paid off with our team hosting record numbers of 4th and 5th-grade regional students.
We then hosted private schools from Austin and San Antonio, in addition to welcoming students from the Universidad Autónoma Agraria Antonio Narro in Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, Texas Tech University, and the United World College in Montezuma, NM.
Volunteers Hoot and Linda Baez led the guided hikes for the visiting schools.
Our former gardener, Seth Hamby, and his partner, Dustin Woods, returned to CDRI for their wedding! Congratulations, Seth and Dustin!
We were delighted to welcome the Road Scholar tour groups as they returned for their fall programs.
To top it all off, we received an additional inch of precipitation, leaving the garden looking more beautiful than ever.
So this newsletter is more like a picture album. It has been fun! And November promises to be just as busy!
Thank you to each of you who visited, renewed your membership, or signed up for a new membership, and for all the kind and supportive emails.
Thank you!
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Kerry Griffis-Kyle was the Conant Guest Lecturer, October 9
The Crowley Theater was the perfect backdrop for CDRI’s fall Roger Conant Distinguished Guest Lecture. CDRI’s guest speaker, Kerry Griffis-Kyle, Professor and Graduate Advisor in the Department of Natural Resources Management at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, discussed the vanishing desert wetlands and the importance of the amphibians that inhabit these ecosystems. The video of the program will be online soon. We’ll post the link on CDRI’s website at www.cdri.org.
We appreciate Kerry fitting us into her busy schedule. We also want to thank Rob Crowley, who provided his technical expertise to ensure the program could proceed. And thank you to Tim Crowley for generously providing the theater to nonprofit organizations like CDRI. This is the tenth year that CDRI has been fortunate to use the Crowley Theater for its lectures.
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Beavertail Fairy Shrimp
by Warren Shaul, guest contributor
The following report by Warren Shaul is timely, given our summer rains and the recent Conant Lecture with Kerry Griffis-Kyle, which focused on desert wetlands. We’re happy to report that the pond in Warren's article still has a small amount of water.
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With the summer rains, grasses and forbs sprang to life throughout the Davis Mountains, bringing patches of color to CDRI. Following two to three years of drought, long dry tanks (ponds) filled with water, and magic happened. Within days, denizens of temporary waters gracefully swam within the pools. Fairy shrimp suddenly appeared like mythical beings, hatched from eggs that may have lain dormant for a decade or more. Most obvious to the human eye were the relatively large beavertail fairy shrimp (Thamnocephalus platyurus), growing to more than an inch in length.
“If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.” Loren Eiseley
Fairy shrimp are arthropods in the subphylum Crustacea (shrimps and crabs), the class Branchiopoda (gill-footed), and the order Anostraca that includes fairy shrimp and brine shrimp. Although brine shrimp (also known as “sea monkeys”) can be found in permanent salty or alkaline lakes (e.g., Great Salt Lake), fairy shrimp are only found in temporary pools filled by rainfall or snowmelt. Female fairy shrimp produce eggs that sink to the pond bottom and lie dormant in dry sediment after the water evaporates. Eggs may stay dormant for many years, hatching only when rainwater or snow melt refills a pond. For some species, the decline in salinity or alkalinity with an increase in volume of water triggers the hatching of eggs, ensuring that fairy shrimp will have enough time to breed and produce eggs for the next generation before the pond completely evaporates and leaves adult fairy shrimp without a home.
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Eleven pairs of paddle-like legs move in unison to power a fairy shrimp as it glides through the water on its back. The leaf-like legs also serve as gills, providing a large surface area to extract dissolved oxygen from water (hence the meaning of their Latin name “gill-footed”). Additionally, the “gill-feet” are part of a feeding apparatus that enables fairy shrimp to filter algae, bacteria, protozoans, and detritus from the water as they swim.
Fairy shrimp are an important part of the food web, converting energy and materials provided by algae and bacteria into bodies that serve as food for aquatic insects, shorebirds, and ducks. Seasonal availability of fairy shrimp can be important to the survival, reproduction, and migration of ducks and shorebirds. Although a fairy shrimp dropped into a fish tank is quickly gobbled up, fairy shrimp habitat is temporary and does not support fish.
When rains fill tanks and temporary ponds, look closely, and you may experience the wonder and joy provided by seeing tiny fairy-like creatures gliding through still waters.
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Area 5th Graders Visited CDRI for “The Earth Rocks!”
On October 1 and 2, area 5th-grade students from Fort Davis, Marfa, Alpine, Valentine, Marathon, and Presidio attended “The Earth Rocks!” Our team, which includes Master Naturalists, graduate students from the Geology Department at SRSU, and the CDRI staff, made the event a resounding success.
We utilized our impressive EMRiver stream table and debuted our stunning groundwater simulation model created by Ward Science.
We received some wonderful thank-you notes from the Marfa ISD 5th-grade class, who loved the hike and the renewable energy lessons the best, while others preferred the stream table and groundwater demonstration. Each of the note cards was accompanied by outstanding artwork.
Thank you to Master Naturalists Marty Havran, Warren Shaul, Hoot and Linda Baez, Pam Cook, Sherry Cardino, Sharon McClanahan, Cameron Adams, Richard Sokol, and Cheryl Trotter. Thank you also to SRSU graduate students Austin Drews and Ryan Smith. And thank you to CDRI’s team, Jake, Will, Scott, Faith, and Mady.
We hope you enjoy the photos below.
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CDRI welcomed area 4th graders to Herps Day!
Herps Day is a program that was created nine years ago with the help of some very enthusiastic and determined graduate students in the Sul Ross State University (SRSU) Biology Club. At their insistence, we set a date and rolled out our first Herps program to an enthusiastic audience of 4th-grade students and their teachers. It was such a huge success that we now have schools making advance reservations to ensure a place in the program.
Herps Day teaches about the field of herpetology (the study of amphibians and reptiles). Students learn about the various adaptive features of toads, lizards, and turtles, among other specimens presented. They learn about venomous and non-venomous snakes, as well as their role in the ecosystem. And they learn the basics of first aid in the case of a snake bite.
Students from Valentine, Marfa, Van Horn, Presidio, Alpine Elementary, and Alpine Christian School attended this year’s program.
SRSU’s Biology Professor Thor Larson and the SRSU Biology Club led this year’s program. Master Naturalists Warren Shaul, Albert Bork, Marty Havran, and Allen Tscheyka also provided valuable information at their learning stations. The CDRI staff did a great deal of the behind-the-scenes work, ensuring the program flowed smoothly.
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Herps Day volunteers from the SRSU Biology Club and Tierra Grande Master Naturalists.
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Visiting Schools and Tour Groups
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Art Blocks Marfa Weekend
Participants in Art Blocks Marfa Weekend met at CDRI to hike Clayton's Overlook and the Outer Loop.
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Austin International School
Austin International School, Austin, Texas, is a trilingual immersion school that teaches students in French, English, and Spanish. While at CDRI, 28 4th-grade students and their adult chaperones, all conversing in French, hiked to Clayton's Overlook, the Outer Loop, and the Upper Rim of Modesta Canyon.
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St. Luke's Episcopal School
Twenty 6th-graders from St. Luke's Episcopal School in San Antonio, Texas, along with the school's adult sponsors, hiked the Modesta Canyon Trail.
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Universidad Autónoma Agraria Antonio Narro
Students from the Universidad Autonoma Agraria Antonio Narro, Saltillo, Coahuila, Mexico, and Dr. J. Javier Ochoa-Espinoza, visited CDRI in advance of participating in a plant identification contest at Sul Ross State University in Alpine, Texas.
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Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX
“The Path That Meets Us” is the Texas Tech University (TTU) course that inspired the field trip to CDRI. Led by Bryan Giemza, Professor of Humanities and Literature in the Honors College, and Jerod Foster, Associate Professor in the College of Media and Communication, students from TTU enjoyed an afternoon hiking Modesta Canyon and the Outer Loop with Hoot and Linda Baez as guides.
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United World College, Montezuma, NM
UWC-USA is an international boarding school that serves nearly 240 students ages 16-19 from more than 90 different countries. The campus is one of 17 United World Colleges worldwide, and the only UWC in the United States.
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Road Scholar
Road Scholar, a nonprofit organization that provides educational travel experiences, visited CDRI twice in October for garden tours and lunch on the porch. It’s always a special treat for us to welcome back friends and make new ones along the way.
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| Until the next time, we wish you
happy trails wherever they may lead.
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These photos were taken in mid-October. The flowers have since faded, but the landscape, having transitioned into its fall colors, remains beautiful.
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Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute, P.O. Box 905, Fort Davis, TX 79734
432.364.2499
www.cdri.org
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