On Fol’s traces to the Plankton Wonders
Owing to the hospitality of Dr. John Dolan, who not only provided lab space but also enabled the collection of plankton by boat, Assoc.-Prof. Sabine Agatha and BSc Maximilian Ganser could study and preserve material of 21 tintinnid species within a single week.
The live observation and documentation (photos, videos, drawings) of the species in France is complemented by histochemical stains and electron microscopical investigations (SEM, TEM) in Salzburg as well as barcoding of the species.
The newly discovered morphological, ultrastructural, and genetic features will be used for inferring phylogenetic relationships among the about 1,000 species of tintinnid ciliates, a group of ecologically important planktonic protists accomplishing an energy flux from other heterotrophic protists and unicellular algae to higher levels of the food web, e.g., fish larvae.
The small field laboratory of the Station Zoologique de Villefranche was founded by Hermann Fol in 1882 in the quarantine building of a hospital adjacent to the current Observatoire Océanologique de Villefranche
While the plankton samples were generally taken from the shore or the boat, here Maximilian Ganser uses the plankton net during a snorkelling trip
Plankton organisms (from left to right): metazoan larvae, copepod, veliger larvae, tontoniid ciliate, four tintinnid ciliates in their vase- or tube-shaped houses (loricae), and two “radiolaria”.