Chrysosporum

Tastes good, that name. Chrysosporum - a golden seed. Does not take one's thoughts directly to the for so many odious world of the cyanobacteria, but that is the right address anyway.

The young Czech cyano-researcher, Eliska Zapomelova (sorry about the missing characters in your name - I not a master enough over my keyboard to be able to produce them by myself and a simple copy-paste did not work this time) with her colleagues writes in an interesting article in Hydrobiologia about the new genus Chrysosporum, which is - as we can read - based on the further research on our old friend Anabaena bergii. Which again is - as far as I know - not recorded here in Finland. At least it's not on the official algae lists. According to Zapomelova and her colleagues, this species has a kind of a golden coat on it's akinete, which explanis the choice of the beautiful name. Want to see.

The rest of the article describes a few cyano's that are recorded for the first time in the Czech Republic. There seems to be an invasion going on. Or is it just the lack of our knowledge till now on? Anyway, it would be very interesting to see what all kind of cyanobacteria there are really living here, in the Finnish waters. I bet there would be a couple of new species, not only for the Finnish algae list, but who knows for the whole scientific world, if one looks closely enough.

The catch of the day

Took a ride to Lövö today.

Went to the water near the old ferry point and took a sample. Back at the office I saw some fine, common spring algae of the Baltic Sea, like this Nitzschia frigida :

Nice to see some fresh algae again, after all those lugol samples.

Baltic Sea phytoplankton taxa

Wuuh, what did I find now!!? The famous Guy Hällfors Baltic Sea Phytoplankton Checklist in Excel form! Now it's possible to do all kinds of things with this data.

There is a link at the Baltic Sea Portal to this page. When using Opera, you'll get this message: "Unable to complete secure transaction". But, they did kindly advice you to use IE 8 or Mozilla, didn't you read that! Ok. Mozilla then. But still, before you get to see this treasure, you have accept the page. Because when you click the link, you get the message "Security certificate is expired". It should be safe, though... I contacted the Balti Sea Portal and they adviced me to accept it. I still do wonder why this goody is hidden here, behind all these barriers?