When the Mono Lake Committee was founded in 1978, it was done so by biologists dedicated to an increased understanding of the Mono Lake ecosystem. The biological understanding of the lake gains its modern foundations from the "Mono Basin Research Group" of 1976. Not only did this group of undergraduates (which also included David Herbst and Gayle Dana) conduct the first ecosystem-wide study of the lake, but it was in the camp on DeChambeau Creek that many seminal discussions first took place: just how and whether an organized research group should continue at the lake, what kinds of solutions might be crafted to reduce the environmental problems engendered by a falling lake, etc.

While discussing these issues and so much about the biology of the lake over a bowl of oatmeal in the morning or a watermelon on a dry, hot afternoon, many lasting friendships also were forged and strengthened. David and Sally Gaines were part of that original camp. They and I had been good friends at UC Davis, and David had first introduced Jefferson Burch and Christine Weigen to the lake on a brief visit from the Slate Creek Valley in the previous summer. When Jefferson, Christine, and I first met in the fall of 1975 to discuss writing the proposal for the grant that was to fund our research in 1976, our meetings included a session in David and Sally's living room in Davis.

Looking back at the report from the 1976 study, most of the findings have stood the test of time and legal action extremely well. And subsequent research has built on that foundation to answer most of the pressing questions (at least those that could be answered) relating to the debate over lake levels. There are certainly many remaining issues that pertain to the lake's health and its restoration, but now that the lake-level debate has cooled, it seems an appropriate time to consider indulging in some research at the lake for no other reason than the intrinsic interest of the lake's ecology and the biology of the animals and plants that live there.

To an ecologist, the Mono Lake ecosystem might be most parsimoniously described as discrete, moderate in size, long-lasting, and simple. All lakes are aquatic islands in a sea of land, but Mono Lake is even more discrete than most--no streams carry its organisms and nutrients away. The Mono Lake ecosystem is just the right size for research; there are few ecosystems that support billions of macrobiota across which one can travel in an hour's boat ride. Despite its considerable size, many ecosystems as large would have disappeared or changed drastically over a few tens of thousands of years. But Mono Lake shows every sign of having existed for hundreds of thousands of years. The longevity of the Mono Lake ecosystem is especially notable given the ephemeral nature of most other lakes in the Great Basin. But most distinctively for Mono Lake, its ecosystem is relatively simple. A lake so large and old with no fish is exceptional, and the lake's formidable production of algal and bacterial populations that are consumed almost exclusively by brine shrimp and alkali flies make it even more remarkable.

Mono Lake's mud is infamously deep, black, and smelly, and it is in Mono's mud that I feel that one of the most interesting scientific adventures lies waiting. In recent years there has been a great deal of interest in the "egg banks" in which aquatic invertebrates sometimes leave substantial numbers of their eggs buried in the bottoms of the lakes in which they live. As sediments accumulate in the lakes, eggs from earlier years are buried progressively deeper in the mud, and sediment cores can reveal the history of the invertebrate populations. The brine shrimp in Mono Lake are unlike many others in that their eggs do not float, and they are thus ideally suited to studies of their egg banks. Eggs recovered from deep in sediments can often be hatched out, yielding an incredible rebirth of historical populations in the laboratory. Animals from eggs laid many years before can be reared side-by-side with modern animals, and their reproductive biology and resistance to stresses can be assessed. Not until it is tried will we know how far back in time we can explore these populations, but such research has the potential to answer some of the most resistant questions of Mono Lake biology: how have the shrimp responded to the many variations in salinity? Have any changes in physiology, body size, etc., been the result of natural selection and a change in the genetic composition of the shrimp, or have the animals been able to respond with simple physiological adjustments?

Another fascinating question relates to the color forms of the Mono shrimp: some are pink and some are aqua in color. Some attribute these differences to the shrimp eating different kinds of algae or to different modes of hemoglobin synthesis, and I also once heard the hypothesis that the blue-colored form carries a virus responsible for the color. But what influence, if any, does bird predation have on the relative advantages of these two forms? A historical record might give us excellent evidence.

Anyone who has paddled a canoe in Mono might have wondered what is behind the dense aggregations one sees among the shrimp: even away from fresh spring inflows that engender huge "boils" of shrimp, there are smaller plumes, especially in relatively shallow water. Are these the result, as some researchers have suggested, of purely physical convective columns of water that entrap the shrimp? Or are they active aggregations for mating? Or for the numerical advantage of reducing an individual shrimp's chances of being eaten? These and many other questions on the shrimp await further research.

And finally, to birds. How do the lake's birds track the remarkably variable distribution of shrimp and flies around the lake? How much of the prey patchiness is the result of physical processes like wind, and how much might be consequences of the birds themselves depleting patches of their food? Some of our research in the old days began to get at this problem, but there are many recent technological developments for monitoring population densities and bird movements, and the time is ripe for exploring these questions at Mono.

Just how birds might move to track variation in food densities raises larger-scale questions about how the breeding birds that use Mono Lake might respond to variation in the availability of food and nesting sites throughout the Great Basin. How do the breeding gulls recognize and rank available habitat, and where do young birds from Mono Lake end up breeding? To aquatic birds searching for breeding opportunities in the Great Basin, this region is an enormous expanse of inhospitable terrain punctuated occasionally, and unpredictably, with islands of suitable habitat. And one of the most active areas of ecological research today relates to the challenge of explaining the spatial dynamics of animal populations. Mono Lake and its sibling lakes in the Great Basin together provide an ever-changing palette of resources available for feeding and nesting. Just how do each of the many species of aquatic birds in the Great Basin choose where they will attempt to breed or feed during migration? And how do the differing ecological requirements of each result in different patterns of movement, gene flow, and evolution across this broad expanse of the Earth's surface?

I find these last questions especially compelling, not only because the Great Basin is one of the best places on Earth to address these questions, but also because thinking of these questions takes me back in time to the very earliest days of my research at Mono Lake. Many of us in the original Mono Basin Research Group saw the study at Mono Lake as only the beginning in a larger understanding of the lakes of the Great Basin. And as I dream of returning to the lake to do research, I dream of seeing a larger scope of endeavor characterize research there: an endeavor in which the coupled curiosity and concern for Mono can be expanded to include all the lakes of the Great Basin.