I was playing around with pictures this evening. Normally, I don't mess with pictures in my blogs because, frankly, I'm too lazy. But this night, for some reason, I decided I was tired of looking at the large expanses of plain green that made up the stock template at my Blogspot site. So I thought I'd fix that. And then I noticed that the images I was playing with were showing up on Bloggerparty's Popular Content sidebar. With my nonsense tag names and no explanations. I could understand if some of my blogging buddies clicked on these names and went, well, "What the ..."? So, here's the "What the ..." Which just happens to be my opportunity to tell you a little bit about what I actually do for a living. When I'm not writing about war, and peace, and purloined bicycles, and geriatric cats, that is.

In fact, I think I've written about just about everything on the planet except what I do for a living. That, and pornography. Don't get me started on pornography. Check me profile, mate. Profile states: I'm a working scientist studing microbial life in the oceans. The really small stuff. I spend quite a bit of time taking pictures of little things and growing them in test tubes, trying to work out what each one is and the evidence against it.

This one, for example.

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The green cells are actually part of a tiny plant that lives inside the body of a larger red seaweed. One that looks something like this:

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You might think that because the green plant lives inside the red plant that the green plant was some kind of parasite. That doesn't appear to be true. I've not found any evidence that the green plant takes anything from the red one. If anything, the green alga is using the red one as a hideout, from snails and things that would gobble it up if it were caught out in the open. It's just a little thing, after all.

Why do I care? Well, it turns out there are hundreds of kinds of these little green algae out there hanging inside larger seaweeds. Most of which have never been described by any scientist. You won't find the name Acrochaete ramosa in any guidebook or Web search. Because my colleagues and I haven't published it yet. It's coming.

Not only are these new species, many of those species represent previously unseen branches in the tree of life. So they help us work out when and how the different kinds of green plants evolved.

And then there's this one, called Dinobryon:

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Dinobryon cells sit at the ends of long, hollow, colorless tubes. Yes, they look blue in the picture. Hang on a moment, we'll get there. The tubes get stuck end to end and yield little trees that float, and in fact actually swim, through the water. In the summer months, the little Dinobryon "trees" (or "colonies") can be abundant, enough so that the fresh water they're in gets a "fishy" smell and taste. Distasteful, perhaps, but not poisonous.

The tubes are made, so I'm told, of chitin. Chitin is the stuff that makes up the shell of a shrimp, or a crab, or a beetle, or a cockroach. It's not made by a lot of algae or protozoa. Chitin has an interesting property. When you shine a blacklight (ultraviolet light) on it, it will emit ("fluoresce") blue light. Which is exactly what's happening in the picture. I can't find any evidence that anybody's tried this before. Incidentally, chlorophyll, the "green" of green leaves, fluoresces red when you shine a black light on it. Which is what the live cell in the picture is doing. I know it looks orange. Trust me, it's red.

And finally (for this session anyway), this one:

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It's a bunch of green beads connected by a net of colorless fibers; Chlorarachnion reptans means "spreading green net". The fibers are much more visible under a specific set of microscope settings called "phase contrast optics":

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This microbe actually needs a movie to do it full justice. One crisis at a time please, I'm just getting in to the still images thing here. But, y'see, those "fibers"? They're moving ... like an amoeba's. In fact, Chlorarachnion reptans is an amoeba. One that literally stole the chloroplasts from another kind of cell. So now, the Chlorarachnion can move like an animal and eat like an animal, but it can make its own sugar from sunlight, carbon dioxide and water like a plant. In terms of evolutionary history, it is neither an animal nor a plant.

Confused? So are a lot of people. The full story would fill several CDs. Suffice to say, Chlorarachnion is an important experimental model that we use to understand how various branches of the tree of life came to have photosynthetic members.

These are just three of the hundreds of thousands of species of living algae and protozoa on the planet. We think we know enough of about 20% of the total to put meaningful names on them. Each one, we think, has a different role to play on our planet. Knowing what those roles are will make a difference in our understanding of what will happen to the planet as a result of global warming.

Oh, ooops, I said "global warming", didn't I? I forget, global warming doesn't exist. No wonder funding for understanding its effects, or for any line of work related to it, is so hard to come by.

Oh well. Enjoy the pictures anyway. With any luck, I'll get to take more. Someday.

   - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.