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Diatom Species Epithemia
Caption:
A Epithemia species of diatom. Diatoms are a large group of microscopic algae that grow as single cells or small colonies. This sample was taken as part of a Mongolian-American international partnership to survey the diatom flora of Hovsgol National Park in north-central Mongolia.
More about this Image
Dr. Mark B. Edlund, is in the process of collecting, cataloging, and preserving diatom specimens from a remote lake in north-central Mongolia. Diatoms are a large group of microscopic algae that grow as single cells or small colonies. They are an important part of the "primary producer" community in most aquatic habitats. They often live within narrow environmental conditions and can be important indicators of such changes as pollution, water temperature, nutrient levels, and salinity.
"Diatoms are incredibly valuable as a tool for water quality monitoring," Dr. Edlund explains. "And they are one of the primary tools used in paleo-ecology, a discipline that uses fossil organisms to decipher environmental history."
The recipient of a 3-year postdoctoral NSF International Research Fellow Award for his work on diatoms in Mongolia's Lake Hovsgol National Park, Dr. Edlund and his collaboration of American and Mongolian scientists have made over 600 collections of diatoms to date from Lake Hovsgol. They have established permanent herbarium collections in both countries, at the National University of Mongolia, and at the California Academy of Sciences, the University of Michigan, and the Science Museum of Minnesota in the United States.
Dr. Edlund chose Lake Hovsgol and the surrounding region because it is one of the most pristine large lakes on earth and therefore globally significant as a natural laboratory for the study of ecology and evolution. The lake is estimated to be over 1.6 million years old.
The most recent biotic survey of Lake Hovsgol had been done in 1903, nearly a century ago. The lack of extensive sampling led Dr. Edlund and his collaborators, Dr. Eugene Stoermer of the University of Michigan and Dr. Ts. Jamsran of Mongolian State University, to conclude that the biodiversity of diatoms in Lake Hovsgol was severely underestimated.
Accessing a number of microscope slides from the 1903 collection initially made by a Russian zoologist, Dr. Edlund's team discovered that a number of species originally described were still alive and well in Lake Hovsgol. And a number of diatoms were endemic to that lake. He confirmed the results by taking a sediment core of material approximately 150 years old, and comparing it to recent samples. He found the same species complex existed in both the core samples and in the lake today.
Lake Hovsgol has been named Mongolia's first International Long-Term Ecological Research (ILTER) site.
This text was taken from When is a Diatom like a Dodo Bird—Documenting Diversity in Mongolia’s Lake Hovsgol, an NSF Directorate for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences Nugget story.
(Preview Only)
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| Credit: |
Credit Mark B. Edlund, Ph.D. |
| Decade of Image: |
2000 - 2009 |
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Categories:
BIOLOGICAL / Ecological
Formats Available:
Restrictions:
No additional restrictions--beyond NSF's general restrictions--have been placed on this image. For a list of general restrictions that apply to this and all images in the NSF Image Library, see the section "Conditions".
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