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Freshwater Colloquium: Our Ancient Lakes: A Natural History
February 12 @ 3:00 pm - 3:50 pm
Dr. Jeffrey McKinnon will present “Our Ancient Lakes: A Natural History” as part of the School of Freshwater Sciences spring colloquium.
Dr. McKinnon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at East Carolina University. He received his BSc from the University of British Columbia and his PhD from Harvard University. His research has taken him to every continent but Antarctica and has appeared in journals including Nature and the American Naturalist. He is the author of “Our Ancient Lakes: A Natural History”.
The unexpected diversity, beauty, and strangeness of life in ancient lakes—some millions of years old—and the remarkable insights the lakes are yielding about the causes of biodiversity.
Most lakes are less than 10,000 years old and short-lived, but there is a much smaller number of ancient lakes, tectonic in origin and often millions of years old, that are scattered across every continent but Antarctica: Baikal, Tanganyika, Victoria, Titicaca, and Biwa, to name a few. Often these lakes are filled with a diversity of fish, crustaceans, snails, and other creatures found nowhere else in the world. In Our Ancient Lakes, Jeffrey McKinnon introduces the remarkable living diversity of these aquatic bodies to the general reader and explains the surprising, often controversial, findings that the study of their faunas is yielding about the formation and persistence of species.
Lessons From Lake Tanganyika’s Scale Eating Fish | The MIT Press Reader
This presentation is open to students, faculty, staff, alumni and the public.
The Colloquium series creates a platform where students, faculty, and scientists discuss emergent issues related to freshwater science research. Invited speakers present specific topics of their research, as well as policy, commercial, and industrial experiences.