Iconographia Diatomologica, Volume 10: SEM-Studied Diatoms of Different Regions of the World Ocean

About this book

Language: English with bilingual abstract in English and Russian

The book presents extensive data on plankton diatoms collected at 75 stations during many oceanographic expeditions of Russian research ships and investigated by scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The sampling sites were located in three main phytogeographical regions: the Arcto-Boreal (Bering Sea, North Pacific, North Atlantic and White Sea), Tropical (Equatorial and Eastern Pacific near North and South American coasts), and the Subantarctic and Antarctic (Atlantic and Pacific sectors and the stations southward of New Zealand).

A total of 139 plates with 560 photographs illustrate 110 diatom species. The number of the identified centric species was twice as much as the pennate species. Detailed morphological descriptions along with geographical and ecological distribution are given for almost all of these species. The high quality of the SEM images makes fine valve structure visible, with all the details such as areolae pattern, number and location of processes of different kinds, vela, striae, sternum (for pennates), and others observable. Some rare peculiarities of frustule structure are described.

Owing to the gentle tecnnique of mount preparation, which kept the diatoms from breaking, many images of the whole frustules and colonies were obtained. The size range is given for each species. Most of the species belong to microphytoplankton and only a few of them belong to nano- and macrophytoplankton. Seven types of distribution ranges are considered (arcto-boreal, boreal-pacific, tropical,Pacificantarctic, bipolar, boreal-notal and cosmopolitan) with the descripdon of the typical species and their ecological characteristics.

It was shown that ecologically the neritic and panthalassic species are common among the plankton diatoms, and truly oceanic species are very rare. Different distribution patterns are discussed in relation to each species type. The arcto-boreal and tropical neritic species exhibit a circumcontinental, and the panthalassic species a latitudinal type of zonation. The distribution of the notal-antarctic ice-neritic species has similar patterns as the arcto-boreal and tropical neritic species, but with additional influence of latitudinal zonation.

The diatom iconography would be useful for phytoplankton taxonomists, and the high-quality SEM images of the diatoms with distinct morphological features could be helpful in evolutionary reconstruction.

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