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Biodiversity: Can aquatic fleas save the world's amphibians? http://apocadocs.com/s.pl?1314487566
Working in a laboratory setting, Oregon State researchers say they've discovered a freshwater organism that eats the free-swimming spores of a fungal pathogen that's been devastating amphibian populations worldwide, including Colorado's endangered boreal toad.
This tiny zooplankton, called Daphnia magna, could provide a desperately needed tool for biological control of this deadly fungus if field studies show that the same process works in a natural setting....
"These are just your average Daphnia," zoologist and lead author Julia Buck said Friday in a telephone interview before heading into the field for more research. The small organisms are sometimes described as aquatic fleas. They're native northern and western North America and have been used for decades to test water for toxins.
"They're filter feeders ... so they're just taking in these zoospores," she said.
"There was evidence that zooplankton would eat some other types of fungi, so we wanted to find out if Daphnia would consume the chytrid fungus," said Buck, an OSU doctoral student in zoology and lead author on the study. "Our laboratory experiments and DNA analysis confirmed that it would eat the zoospore, the free-swimming stage of the fungus."
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[Read more stories about:
amphibian collapse, species restoration, bioremediation]
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