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Just started to take a look at the Baltic Sea phytoplankton for real. And in the first field of view I see this funny thing, that you would not see in the fresh water samples:  Well, this is perhaps a more estetically justified photo of the same thing:  Now you see only the skeleton.This is Ebria tripartita (J.H.K. Schumann, 1867) E.J. Lemmermann, 1899, 25x30 µm.Ok, I admit. It's not phytoplankton. It's a heterotrophic flagellate, a member of "an enigmatic group of eukaryotes with an unclear phylogenetic position" as Hoppenrath & Leander (2006) so elegantly put it. But it i...

Spent Friday in the capitol, Helsinki. Visited Dr. Anke Kremp, a senior researcher at the Marine Research Centre/Modelling and Innovations Unit of the at the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE) and listened with joy to all the things she had to tell about the Dinoflagellates in the Baltic Sea: the species recorded there, identification, taxonomy and the recent changes in taxonomy.Because of the brackish water in the Baltic Sea and the gradual changes of salinity along the Finnish coast the species assemblage has its very own character. A checklist of the Baltic phytoplankton was published in...

What a wonderful place to be, this BHL! Here they have quite nice quality of pictures too. Just take a look at the original drawing of Microcystis parasitica. Not bad.You can search in many different ways: General / Books/Journals / Authors / Subjects / Scientific Names / Citation Finder (BETA) or browse by Titles | Authors | Subjects | Map | Year | Collections. Searched for Microcystis parasitica and got 21 publications! With a direct link to the PAGE where this species was mentioned. Unbelievable! And it's fast. Or maybe it's just that the rest of the village is not hanging on the net right ...

A new interesting project has started in Finland: BioTar - Development of biological monitoring methods for the effects of the use of peat lands. The abbreviation BioTar comes from the words Biological, of course and Tarkkailu (=monitoring). The ending "-tar" means a female person in Finnish, so altogether the name gives an impression - at least to this Finnish mind - of a green, fairylike spirit leading the study. The aim of the study, that takes place between 2011 and 2014, is to find new, innovative and cost effective methods to estimate the the ecological state of the water near peat lands...

Well, this is getting difficult! What we till now on were happy and content to call Euglena actually includes two groups of organisms, that have to be placed in two different genera: Euglena and the new Euglenaria. Euglenaria means Euglena-like.And they certainly are, Euglena-like. For Euglenaria's are morphologically indistinguishable from the "old" Euglena's. The difference of these taxa lies in the genes, far beyond the resolving power of the microscope. The difficulty for a regular plankton counter is, that if one can't identify a taxon to a specific Euglena-species, one has to jump one st...