A sampling trip earlier this month brought me back to the marine microworld. In this part of the world the phenomenon "plankton bloom" pops up every year in the spring and early autumn. I understood this has got something to do with the environmental circumstances that provide availability of silica, the material from which diatom's "shells" have been constructed. At the bottom of the food chain, diatoms provide straightaway or indirectly, food for everything else that's living in the sea (and a substantial part of the world's oxygen production, but that's another story). So when diatoms prosper, the rest will also benefit.
This time the plankton net itself remained rather empty, a second sampling location close to the first one contained a versatile collection of algae and diatom material.
Diatoms growing together in something like tubes, diatoms overgrowing algae material and diatoms in other string and chainlike formations.
And in that diatom mix I discovered an extravagant Platynereis larvae, a bristle worm (1). A living specimen which I captured in a stack when it had its quiet moment.
The image has not been enhanced whatsoever, so that green belly was actually there. You can notice the characteristic bristle hairs developing, and a rudimentary variant too.
For the rest there were more youngsters in the vincinity of that plant material, including copepods in different stages and bell animacules (2).
The conclusion was we had to wait a couple more weeks to find that explosion of phytoplankton colouring the samples brownish green, anyhow as you can see it was worth the effort.
My special thanks to the founder and president of the Micropolitan Museum for his expertise and inspiration.
1366 pixel resolution : https://we.tl/iwSz6JhZ9d
1 25x DIC
2 25x DIC
3 25x DIC
4 25x DIC
5 16x Polarization
6 25x DIC
Bristleworm Larvae & company & Rhabdonema(edited)
Moderators: rjlittlefield, ChrisR, Chris S., Pau
Bristleworm Larvae & company & Rhabdonema(edited)
Last edited by WalterD on Sat Apr 22, 2017 10:09 am, edited 2 times in total.
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