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Long recovery from mass extinction seen
ITHACA, N.Y., July 17 (UPI) -- Resurrecting old eggs of zooplankton offers insight into how species have evolved, a Cornell University ecologist said in New York.
Nelson Hairston Jr. is a pioneer in a field of "resurrection ecology," which studies the eggs of tiny, free-floating water animals that get buried in lake sediments and can remain viable for decades, Cornell officials said in a release Friday.
Hairston and his team extract eggs from beneath lake bottoms and put them in conditions such as as those found in spring in a temperate lake. Then, they watch for a hatch.
"We can resurrect them and discover what life was like in the past," Hairston said. "Paleo-ecologists study micro fossils, but you can't understand much physiologically or behaviorally" with that approach, Hairston said.
Hairston and his colleagues have organized a resurrection ecology symposium in September 2009, in Herzberg, Switzerland, to gather researchers in their growing new field, Cornell said.
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