En Nur, Israel
A hidden spring, ancient stories, and a rare blind shrimp
On the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberias) lies En Nur, a warm, sulfide-rich spring with a long and fascinating history. Above the spring is an old octagonal pool. In ancient times, people bathed here in the mineral water, and in the 19th century the same water powered a small mill by the lake. Today, the pool is covered by a a roofed structure built of dark basalt stones and sits within the grounds of the Church of the Multiplication—the place that commemorates the Biblical story in which Jesus fed 5,000 people with only five loaves of bread and two fish.
Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and the Fish
Beneath this peaceful site lives one of the most unusual animals: the endemic blind shrimp Typhlocaris galilea. A small number of individuals can be seen in the pool, but most of them inhabit the subterranean tract of En Nur – a tunnel connected to a narrow inclined shaft through which the spring water emerges. The pool also hosts a diverse groundwater fauna, including the peracaridean shrimp Tethysbaena relicta, bathynellids, amphipods, gastropods, oligochaetes, nematodes, copepods, a population of fish whose phenotype differs from populations at nearby sites, and others – that thrive in the warm, sulfurous water.
Sampling eDNA at En Nur (left) and the sampling team at the entrance to the octagonal pool (right). Photos: Oded Bergman and Ohad Zohar.
In the 1960s, a young student named Moshe Tsurnammal attempted to rear these blind shrimps in the lab. For years he kept them at the same temperature as the spring (29-30 °C), hoping they would reproduce, but with no success. Then, while he was absent for several days, the heaters in one of his tanks failed. When he returned, he found the water had cooled to 23 °C – and the shrimps were finally breeding. This accidental discovery led him to propose that somewhere underground, beyond the reach of explorers, Typhlocaris lives in cooler water that allows it to reproduce naturally.
GreG team member Tamar Guy-Haim (left) with Moshe Tsurnammal (middle) inspecting a Typhlocaris specimen. Photo: Efrat Gavish-Regev.
As En Nur is both a sacred site and a rare ecological refuge, it is vital to protect not only its cultural heritage but also the unique subterranean ecosystem and the remarkable creatures that inhabit it.
Tamar Guy-Haim & Oren Kolodny