debor042

by Luca Marazzi * Why is it important to study algae? To start with, algae produce ~ 50% of the oxygen on planet Earth, they are food for small and large animals that in turn are eaten by people, but they also recycle nutrients and absorb CO 2 from the air; by existing and doing their own thing, these microorganisms provide these so called ecosystem services to human beings (Fig. 1). Moreover, as algae reproduce fast and are often adapted to specific environmental conditions, understanding how many species of algae, and which ones, live where and why give us cues as to the health of aquatic ecosystems, such as rivers, lakes, and wetlands.  Fig. 1 . Simplified scheme of the role of algae in food webs (from my Ph.D.  Thesis ). * Dr.   Luca Marazzi   is a freshwater ecologist working in   Dr. Evelyn Gaiser’s research group   in the School of Environment, Arts and Society at Florida International University. His main interest is how biodive...

by Charlotte Briddon*  Brachysira brebissonii (formerly known as Anomoeoneis brachysira ) is a freshwater, benthic diatom. It is widespread in lakes and rivers from the Arctic to tropical and temperate regions. In 1981 the Anomoeoneis and Brachysira genera were separated, as two sets of longitudinal ribs were observed in Brachysira specimens, one surrounding the valve (marginally at the junction of valve face and mantle), and another composed of two straight ribs, discontinuous in the central area that border the raphe , which the genus Anomoeoneis lacks.               Brachysira brebissonii   (photo   taken by Paul Hamilton at Egg Harbour Lakes, New Jersey, United States; see  Hamilton, 2010 ) . Case study of Tasik Chini I have chosen this diatom because it has played a meaningful role in aiding our understanding of past and current environmental conditions/water quality at Tasik Chini, (a flood pulse wetland in Malaysia)....

by Luca Marazzi* Last week about 800 ecologists from 72 countries, including myself, attended and presented their research at the 10 th INTECOL Wetlands conference in the beautiful city of Changshu (2 hrs west of Shanghai). Before this event that takes place every four years (in 2012 we were in Orlando for INTECOL 9 ), I was honored to give a long seminar on my work on the algal communities of the Okavango Delta and Everglades at the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology (NIGLAS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I was invited to do that by my friend Xuhui Dong (we studied together for our PhD at the UCL Environmental Change Research Center in the UK). Xuhui and his colleagues recently conducted a paleolimnology study of several floodplain lakes along the mighty Yangtze River (Dong et al., 2016), where they found large numbers of Aulacoseira granulata [ (Ehrenberg) Simonsen 1979] , which is therefore our September diatom (a belated post). ...

by Luca Marazzi* Nitzschia amphibia belongs to the nitzschioid group : its v alves are symmetrical to both apical and transapical axes, and taper to bluntly rounded apices ; the raphe is well developed near the valve margin, and enclosed within a canal 1 . The original description was made by Albert Grunow in 1852, when the US President was Millard Fillmore, the  last one not to be affiliated with either the Democratic   or   Republican party . This is how ‘old’ are some of the species names of algae and other organisms that persist to this day, while new species are continuously described at an increasing rate. Grunow was one of the eight most ‘profilic’ algal taxonomists who described more than 1,000 species during their career, the others being Kützing, Gottfried, Hustedt, Agardh, Harvey, who worked in the 1800s, and Lange-Bertalot (the only one still alive and active ) and Skvortsov in the 1900s 2 . Fig. 1.   a)  Nitzschia amphibia  in valve view and ...