By Sarah Shaddock

Residents of New York City are lucky enough to have access to clean, reliable — and apparently great tasting — drinking water. When considering the high marks for the city’s tap water, it could be easy to assume that it’s free of any microscopic crustaceans, right? If you avoided coverage over the past 10 years or missed the recent gain in popularity from this article linked from Reddit, we are sorry to break it to you: your water does, in fact, contain microscopic crustaceans.

Before you freak out, these crustaceans, known as copepods, are harmless — not even posing a threat to those who have shellfish allergies. It’s still pretty gross to think about, but since New York’s water quality exceeds federal standards, the water is not filtered — thus, the copepods remain. While still an unpleasant realization, these copepods actually help keep mosquito larvae out of the water supply.

The main controversy over these organisms is in regards to the city’s Orthodox Jewish population, where there has been much debate on whether or not copepods can be considered kosher. As explained in a New York Times article, the Orthodox Union recommends filtering water, but states that the copepods are not necessarily non-kosher, quoting David Berger, a professor of history at the City University Graduate Center, as saying, “The notion that God would have forbidden something that no one could know about for thousands of years, thus causing wholesale, unavoidable violation of the Torah, offends our deepest instincts about the character of both the Law and its Author.”

Despite swallowing countless of these microorganisms each time we drink unfiltered tap water, at least we are not exposed to mosquito larvae, right? Plus, if you really do have an issue with this discovery, basic water filters strain out the crustaceans.

With mice and cockroaches as New Yorkers’ typical pests, it seems that these crustaceans are less of a nuisance than they are unspoken heroes. Perhaps, they’re the hero NYU deserves, but not the one it needs right now during this hellish week of finals. Over the past academic year, we have learned to deal with endless could-be snow days and slush puddles, just as we have learned to deal with the classic Albert crashes. Saying goodbye to this crustacean-filled water is much like saying goodbye to the campus itself: we do in fact appreciate all the good it does for us, and some aspects of it can seem kind of gross, but it is ours and we love it. Until next time, NYU.

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