Male water fleas that scientists have never seen have made their debut in a University at Buffalo laboratory, providing biologists with their first glimpse of these elusive organisms.The UB research, published last month in Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, opens a new window on the biological diversity of several species of water fleas, including those in the genus Daphnia and the genus Bosmina, that play major roles in freshwater food webs. It also demonstrates that pesticides that mimic the hormone used in the UB experiments may have much broader effects than initially believed, and could damage populations of fish and other organisms higher up in the food chain.
