Tootfinder

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Today's organism is the primarily freshwater dinoflagellate phytoplankon genus Ceratium, characterized by cellulose armored plates, two flagella, and horns, resembling Eiffel towers. These large, tough algae can form dense blooms which few zooplankton graze, and can cause oxygen depletion. These 7 species are mixotrophic, so graze on other algae or bacteria …

Hello everyone.
I am taking a social media wellness break from posting my Weekend #Plankton Factoids for the boreal summer. I hope you have the opportunity to do something you enjoy over the season as well. Until then ❤️.

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
This is likely Earth's most common metazoan (animal). Meet Oithona similis, a small predatory, cyclopoid copepod. It is highly tolerant of temperature and salinity ranges, having a cosmopolitan distribution within every ocean, from poles to tropics, and is common in the epi to mesopelagic zones. Densities range from hundreds to several thousand per m³ of wat…

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Researchers that work on zooplankton are all familiar with fecal pellets since it is a major pathway of #carbon flux to the bottom of the oceans. A study recently measured gut passage time of

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
I spent the last week attending the joint ASLO - SIL conference (the two largest #limnology societies) in Montréal. There were many interesting talks, including a few on alpine lake systems. These are very cold, ice-covered for much of the year, with extreme adapted…

Weekend #Plankton Factoid 🦠🦐
Recent news has documented warming in polar regions reducing upwelling of cold nutrient rich water and thus algae production. Researchers investigated the change in carbon to chlorophyll ratio to determine nutrient stress.
The genus is Prochlorococcus, a cyanobacteria found across the world's oceans. Because it is so tiny (0.6 micron) it passes through…