EVOLVING DAPHNIA . . . IN MICHIGAN!

Once again, a Slashdot repost, but this story about “resurrecting” Daphnia eggs from over 100 years ago is cool enough to pass on. Basically, Daphnia are zooplankton, tiny aquatic animals very close to the bottom of the food chain. These researchers took soil (mud?) cores from a lake with varied history of pollution, eutrophication, and other impacts, and extracted viable Daphnia eggs from different strata, effectively sampling populations over the course of 100 years. What an awesome system. A data set of living population samples spanning that length of time is a tremendous resource for asking evolutionary questions, especially with organisms that reproduce as quickly and as much as Daphnia. And, since they were able to hatch the eggs, they can take molecular, morphological, and behavioral measurements, or subject different past populations to “alternate histories.” Too cool. And the paper is free, to boot!