Shiny amber jewelry and a mucky Florida swamp have given scientists a window into an ancient ecosystem that could be anywhere from 15 million to 130 million years old.
Scientists at the University of Florida and the Museum of Natural History in Berlin made the landmark discovery that prehistoric aquatic critters such as beetles and small crustaceans unwittingly swim into resin flowing down into the water from pine-like trees. Their findings were Using health statistics, travel advisories, surveys and other sources, researchers created this map showing different levels of malaria risk.
In the pink areas, the risk is very low — less than one clinical malaria episode per 10,000 people per year. In the “stable” red areas, the amount of transmission is higher and without any marked fluctuation from one year to the next. Malaria Atlas Project swamp environments. Later the swamps may dry up and the resin hardens.” Dilcher and Alexander Schmidt, a researcher at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, replicated the prehistoric demise of the water bugs by taking a handsaw to a swamp on Dilcher‘s property near Gainesville. After they cut bark from some pine trees, the resin flowed into the water and they collected the goo and took it back to Dilcher‘s lab on campus.
Stuck in the sticky sap were representatives of almost all the small inhabitants of the swamp ecosystem, Dilcher said. “We found beautiful examples of water beetles, mites, small crustaceans published in October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The resin with its entombed inhabitants settled to the bottom of the swamp, was covered by sediment and after millions of years became amber, said David Dilcher, a UF paleo-botanist and one of the study‘s researchers.
“People never understood how freshwater algae and freshwater protozoans could be incorporated in amber because amber is considered to have been formed on land,” said Dilcher, who works at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus. “We showed that it just as well could be formed from resin exuded in watery called ostracods, nematodes, and even fungi and bacteria living in the water,” he said.
The discovery not only solved the mystery of how swimming bugs could have been entombed in sticky sap from high up in a tree, but could lead to new information about prehistoric, maybe even Jurassic, swamps, Dilcher said. Studying organisms that were trapped for millions of years in amber may help scientists to recreate prehistoric water ecosystems and learn how these life forms changed over time, he said.