Is there any more information about why they dehydrate/rehydrate in the first place? And how much do they break up, such that their populations would increase?

Not as cool as the creature in the movie The Thing (1982) but still pretty neat.  Only a thousand or so cells though?

I'll stick with the evolution of the Homo lineage.  heh

But still really neat to know.  Thanks, Yellow.

I just listened to that guy speaking on 'NPR: Science Friday" podcast.

The ability of these organisms to do this is certainly very interesting and may indeed have some potential applications.

What pissed me off in the interview I heard was that he seemed to be trying to make a larger point, that the rotifer demonstrated  that sexual reproduction was not necessary for shuffling of genetic material, probably the most commonly proposed evolutionary justification for the emergence of sexual differentiation, especially valuable in increasing our repertoire of responses to infection. He explicitly suggested that the evolutionary explanation for sexual reproduction was still a big mystery, which I don't accept - we actually have a number of plausible explanations, all or some of which may apply in different evolutionary niches. We also have very interesting evidence from studying certain organisms such as some lizards, which can switch from sexual to asexual modes under different environmental pressure, which further messes up his argument on this.

However it seems to me that the mechanism by which the rotifer achieves its DNA variations are not really available to large integrated multicellular organism, such as ourselves, his point was pretty lame.

I found him very UN-impressive.