''Branchinella spinosa'' is a species within the family

Thamnocephalidae Thamnocephalidae is a family of crustaceans with wide distribution including Western Australia, Southern Africa and South America. It was originally described as a subfamily of Branchipodidae by Alpheus Spring Packard in 1883, and elevated to th ...

. This

fairy shrimp Anostraca is one of the four orders of crustaceans in the class Branchiopoda; its members are referred to as fairy shrimp. They live in vernal pools and hypersaline lakes across the world, and they have even been found in deserts, ice-covered mou ...

species occurs in parts of

Southern Africa Southern Africa is the southernmost subregion of the African continent, south of the Congo and Tanzania. The physical location is the large part of Africa to the south of the extensive Congo River basin. Southern Africa is home to a number of ...

, notably the

Makgadikgadi Pans The Makgadikgadi Pan (Tswana pronunciation ), a salt pan situated in the middle of the dry savanna of north-eastern Botswana, is one of the largest salt flats in the world. The pan is all that remains of the formerly enormous Lake Makgadikg ...

Botswana Botswana (, ), officially the Republic of Botswana ( tn, Lefatshe la Botswana, label=Setswana, ), is a landlocked country in Southern Africa. Botswana is topographically flat, with approximately 70 percent of its territory being the Kalahar ...

. Other

crustacean Crustaceans (Crustacea, ) form a large, diverse arthropod taxon which includes such animals as decapods, seed shrimp, branchiopods, fish lice, krill, remipedes, isopods, barnacles, copepods, amphipods and mantis shrimp. The crustacean group ...

species found in this region of Botswana in co-existence with ''B. spinosa'' include ''

Moina belli ''Moina belli'' is a species of crustaceans within the family Moinidae, described by Robert Gurney in 1904. This species lives in waters containing high salinity and other impurities, such as the Makgadikgadi Pans region of Botswana Bots ...

''.

References

Branchiopoda Crustaceans described in 1840 Freshwater crustaceans of Africa Taxa named by Henri Milne-Edwards {{branchiopoda-stub

See also

References