I’ve tried to capture the world of microscopic benthic algae many times but never, until now, attempted the same effect with plankton. The picture below illustrates the problem that I face: whereas the benthic flora are organised with, for the most part, a clear three-dimensional structure and known dependencies amongst organisms (species A, for example, being epiphytic on species B), plankton are randomly distributed in a very dilute solution. My picture below, which is based on four phytoplankton samples collected by the Environment Agency in the summers of 2014 and 2016.
A representation of the phytoplankton of Ennerdale Water with cells of Rhodomonas and Kephyrion depicted at a realistic density (c. 1000 – 2000 cells per millilitre).
I had to address two issues in producing this image, which is based on four phytoplankton samples collected by the Environment Agency in the summers of 2014 and 2016: depicting the phytoplankton cells at approximately the correct density and making sense of the list of names that appeared on the list. Ennerdale Water is a very nutrient-poor lake and cell concentrations during the summer are in the order of 1000 to 2000 per millilitre. That sounds a large number until you consider the scale at which we are working. For simplicity, I assumed spherical cells of about 20 micrometres diameter (= 1/50th of a millimetre) at a density of 1000 cells/ml. That equates to one cell per micrometre which is 1 mm x 1 mm x 1 mm. Using these assumptions, each cell is 50 diameters distant from its nearest neighbour, which means the foreground of a picture should contain only two small cells and a lot of blue paint.
Next, I need to know what algae to paint and the problem here is that 85 per cent of the cells in the Environment Agency phytoplankton analyses were described as “picoplankton < 2 micrometres diameter” or “nanoplankton 2-20 micrometres diameter” (the latter divided into flagellates and non-flagellates). There are, apparently, big difficulties in naming many of the cells found as preservation with Lugol’s Iodine coupled with the long time in storage before analysis can lead to loss of useful diagnostic features. Cells in the nanoplankton category can, in theory, belong to any one of a number of groups of algae but If I focussed just on those organisms that could be named, I see that the Cryptophyta Rhodomonas lacustris var nannoplanctica (formerly R. minuta var. nannoplanctica) predominates, followed by Chrysophytes, of which Kephyrion is the most abundant. So these are the two cells that I have put in the foreground.
I subsequently turned up a paper from 1912 by the father and son team of William and George West who looked at the phytoplankton of Ennerdale Water and a number of other lakes in the Lake District and Scotland. The range of taxa that they found was quite different to that recorded in these recent surveys with samples dominated by desmids and almost no Chrysophytes or Cryptophytes recorded at all. That may, in part, be due to differences in methods – they collected samples using a “silken tow net”, which would probably have missed the very small Chrysophyta and Cryptophyta (an earlier paper by them tells us of the size of the nets but not the mesh itself) . Some desmids that they found were found in the recent surveys but in much smaller quantities and it is possible that this was partly an artefact of the differences in sampling technique. The idea of comparing count data from old papers with modern records is appealing but, in most cases, separating genuine changes in composition from differences introduced by sampling and analytical methods is always difficult.
Excuse these ramblings … there is, as you can see, not a lot of pictorial interest in the underwater world of an oligotrophic lake. If you want excitement, tune into Blue Planet II, David Attenborough’s latest series for the BBC You will find sex and violence galore there. The underwater world of Ennerdale Water is a quieter, more serene and certainly less televisual place. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing …
Lund, J.W.G. (1948) A rarely recorded but very common British alga, Rhodomonas minuta Skuja. British Phycological Bulletin, 2:3, 133-139.
West, W. & West, G.S. (1909). The British freshwater phytoplankton, with special reference to the desmid-plankton and the distribution of British desmids. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B 81: 165-206.
West, W. & West, G.S. (1912). On the periodicity of the phytoplankton of some British lakes. Journal of the Linnaean Society, Botany 40: 395-432.