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“Floodwaters coming down the Murray-Darling system have led to the discovery of new species of microscopic animals. Known as zooplankton, the animals are made up of around 1,000 cells and are less than a millimetre in size.
University of Adelaide freshwater ecologist Russell Shiel says he has been discovering new species every few weeks.
I do a lot of contract work with people sending me samples from all over Australia and almost every set of samples that comes in has something new in it, because these are new areas and it’s a group that hasn’t really been looked at in this country up until now,” he said.
He says they are regularly finding new species in the Lower Lakes region. It’s a one-in-200-year flood event, the high water levels probably scoured flood plains on the Darling and Murray that hadn’t been sampled by anybody and they washed all these organisms downstream.” ABC News