The Kentucky cave shrimp, Palaemonias ganteri, is an eyeless, troglobite shrimp. It lives in caves in Barren County, Edmonson County, Hart County and Warren County, Kentucky. The shrimp's shell has no pigment; the species is nearly transparent and closely resembles its nearest relative, the Alabama cave shrimp.
The habitat of the Kentucky cave shrimp is exclusively in underground streams of caves. It is endemic to the Mammoth Cave National Park region of central Kentucky. The shrimp feeds mainly on sediments that are washed into the cave by the movement of groundwater.
The Kentucky cave shrimp was registered as an endangered species under the Endangered Species Act in 1983, and was included on the IUCN Red List as Endangered in 1994. It is mostly threatened by contaminated groundwater running into its habitat. Several nearby communities either have inadequate sewage treatment facilities or lack such facilities altogether. An additional potential threat is the entry of contaminants from traffic accidents and roadside businesses. One incident in 1979 caused the death of aquatic cave organisms in a part of the Mammoth Cave system, and in a 1980 incident, a truck carrying toxic cyanide salts overturned on Interstate 65, just south of Mammoth Cave National Park.
Famous quotes containing the words kentucky, cave and/or shrimp:
“The head must bow, and the back will have to bend,
Wherever the darkey may go;
A few more days, and the trouble all will end,
In the field where the sugar-canes grow.
A few more days for to tote the weary load,
No matter, t will never be light;
A few more days till we totter on the road:
Then my old Kentucky home, good-night!”
—Stephen Collins Foster (18261884)
“Stands the Spring! heralded by its bright-clothed
Trumpeters, of bough and bush and branch;
Pale Winter draws away his white hands, loathed,
And creeps, a leper, to the cave of time.”
—Philip Larkin (19221986)
“To tell you the truth, Im relieved that the Van Ripers are not coming. Hes telling the same jokes he told twenty years ago and she dyes her hair. I think its a shrimp pink now.”
—Adele Comandini, and Edward Sutherland. Michael OBrien (Charles Winninger)