More algae from Shetland lochs …

I’m taking you back in the Shetland Islands for this post, and onto the remote moorlands of northern Mainland.   When I visited this particular loch in 2016, I noticed a lot of slippery filaments of Batrachospermum attached to the sides of the cobbles in the littoral zone (see “Lucky heather …”).   This time around, I explored further around the edge of the loch and, in the south-west corner noticed prolific growths of algae in the shallow peaty water.  Closer inspection showed that these, too, were the red alga Batrachospermum and, though they were not fertile, Dave John suggests that they are likely to be B. turfosum Bory.

Tufts of Batrachospermum turfosumin the littoral zone of Lamba Water, north Mainland, Shetland Islands, May 2019.   The picture frame is about 15 centimetres across. 

If you have a hand lens you can just about make out a bead-like structure when observing Batrachospermum in the field; however this becomes much clearer with higher magnification.   I think it looks like a bottle-brush when seen under the microscope at low magnification, with whorls of side-branches arising from the central filament.  At higher magnification, these filaments can be seen to have a bead-like structure, with cell size gradually reducing with distance from the centre.

What you cannot do in the field is separate Batrachospermumfrom the closely-related genus Sheathia(see “News about Batrachospermum… hot off the press”).   I usually tell people that, for a general overview of the condition of a stream or lake (for example, as part of the UK macrophyte survey technique), then simply recognising that you have “Batrachospermum” (meaning Batrachospermum or Sheathia) should be enough.   In my experience, the presence of Batrachospermumis usually a good indication that the water body is in a healthy condition.  However, I have been told that Batrachospermumis often found growing prolifically in very enriched conditions in southern chalk streams, which would challenge this assumption.   This may be because the species that are found in southern chalk streams are different to those that I encounter in my more usual haunts in northern England and Scotland.  But it is also possible that the factors I described in “The exception that proves the rule …” pertain in those cases too.

Filaments of Batrachospermum turfosum from Lamba Water, north Mainland, Shetland Islands, May 2019.   The upper photograph shows a low magnification view of a filament (about 350 micrometres, or 0.35 millimetres, wide) whilst the lower image shows a whorl of side branches arising from the main stem.  Scale bar: 20 micrometres (= 1/50^thof a millimetre).  

We often run into this dilemma with filamentous freshwater algae: it is reasonably straightforward to identify the genus but we need reproductive organs to determine the species.  As they seem to survive quite happily in the vegetative state our understanding of the ecology of individual species (rather than the genus as a whole) is scant so it is hard to tell whether there is value in that missing information or not.   In a few cases – this is one – better taxonomic understanding has revealed that we may not even be dealing with a single genus but the lists used for applied ecological surveys still persist with the old concepts.

This creates a toxic spiral of consequences: it is hard to split into species so most people don’t bother. Because we don’t bother, our interpretations are based on generalisations drawn from the behaviour of the genus.  This means we don’t generate the data needed to demonstrate the value (or otherwise) of the effort required to go from genus- to species-level identifications.   So we carry on lumping all records to genus (or, in this case, a pair of genera) and accept a few records that our out of line with our expectations as “noise”.  The situation is probably worse in the UK than in many places because there are very few people in universities specialising in these organisms and, as a result, no-one is producing the data that might break us out of this spiral.

We found Batrachospermum turfosum in a few other locations during our visit, but nowhere, even in nearby lochs, was it in such quantity as we saw in Lamba Water.   Chance might play a part in determining its distribution on a local scale but that ought to be the explanation of last resort rather than the go-to answer when we are worryingly short of hard evidence.

 

 

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Notes from Windermere

Just before the trip to the Shetland Islands I wrote about in the previous post, I spent two days in the Lake District teaching a course on identifying macroalgae for the Freshwater Biological Association.  It coincided with a period of gorgeous weather, showing Windermere at its absolute best (as the photo at top of the post shows).  Only a month ago my wheels were spinning in the snow on Whinlatter Pass (see “How to make an ecosystem (2)”).

Looking up Windermere towards the high peaks of the Lake District’s volcanic centre, I find myself reflecting on how geology creates the diversity in landscapes and aquatic features that, in turn, creates variety in the microscopic flora and fauna (see “The Power of Rock”).   A nuanced understanding of the aquatic world requires one to view the grand panorama at the same time as focussing on organisms that are scarcely visible with the naked eye.

One of the locations that we visited during the course was Cunsey Beck, which flows out from Esthwaite Water and, a few kilometres later, into Windermere.   Esthwaite is one of the more productive of the lakes in this region and we usually find a healthy crop of algae in the beck.   This year was no exception and, amongst the different forms we collected were some long straggly growths that had a slighty gelatinous feel.  Back at the laboratory we put part of one of these growths under the microscope and saw a large number of individual cells set in a jelly matrix.   This identified the alga as Tetraspora gelatinosa, a green alga that I have written about before (see “More from the Atma River …”) although not for some time.

Tetraspora gelatinosafrom Cunsey Beck, Cumbria, May 2019.   The picture frame is about five centimetres wide.

The genus Tetraspora gets its name from a mode of division that leaves many of the daughter cells in groups of four (visible in the lower illustration).  These, in turn, are embedded in mucilage, and repeated divisions can lead to growths becoming visible with the naked eye.   Three species have been recorded from Britain and Ireland, of which the Cunsey Beck population is most likely to belong to T. gelatinosa.   In the past, it might have been called Tetraspoa lubrica, which has a more tubular thallus; however, this is now thought to just be a growth form of T. gelatinosa that is associated particularly with fast-flowing rivers.  As far as I can tell, no-one has performed any detailed molecular genetic studies on this genus to better understand the relationships between these different growth forms so we will have to go with current convention for now.

Tetraspora gelatinosaunder the microscope.   Cells in the foreground are about ten micrometres in diameter.   Photograph by Hannah Kemp.

I’ve seen Tetraspora in a wide range of habitats – on stones in fast-flowing, relatively soft water rivers in Norway and growing on plant stems in the littoral zone of hard water ponds in Ireland.   Most of my records are from the spring, though I should add that spotting some of the smaller gelatinous colonies (barely more than near-transparent dots on the stone surface) does take some practice and I suspect that I have missed it on a few occasions too.

The microscopic image of Tetrasporawas taken during the course using a Carson Hookupz, a neat device which allows a smartphone to be attached to a microscope (or any other optical device).   It takes a little fiddling to get the set-up right but, once this has been achieved, the quality of pictures we obtained was excellent.   My microscope engineer tells me that he is selling large numbers of these to schools and colleges as it means that students can capture images during practical classes that they can subsequently use in reports or just (as was the case during our course) as an aide mémoire.

The Carson Hookupz 2.0 as it comes out of the box (left) and (right) in action during the Identifying Macroalgae course at the Freshwater Biological Association.

Looking north from Miller Ground towards the central Lake District peaks as the sun sets.  The photograph at the top of the post was taken from nearby but shows the view in early morning.  

 

Hyperepiphytes in the Shetland Islands

I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days in the Shetland Islands during last week’s spell of warm weather and spent one of my mornings there hiking in shirtsleeves across moorland to a remote loch.   Good infrastructure is a legacy of the Shetland Islands’ association with the oil industry, and this includes a strong mobile network, meaning that I managed to find this particular loch using the Ordnance Survey maps on my smartphone. I would not normally rely upon a mobile signal to navigate across such remote terrain but in Shetland it is often possible.  I would, nonetheless, recommend keeping a paper map and a GPS in your kit just in case, as I did lose the signal on a few occasions during my stay.

Most of the lochs in the northern part of mainland Shetland are shallow, peaty water bodies, with soft water and relatively sparse assemblages of aquatic plants.   Parts of the littoral zone of this particular loch, however, had extensive growths of submerged mosses.  It is a long time since I was proficient at identifying aquatic mosses but these clumps look likeWarnstofia fluitans to me, though I am willing to be proved wrong.  I did try to remove some leaves and have a proper look but that task was complicated by tufts of attached filamentous algae.   In their submerged state, these formed distinct clusters at intervals along the straggly stems of the moss but, once removed, the filaments collapsed to smother the leaves and confound my attempts to run a scalpel blade along the stem.

Submerged colonies ofWarnstorfia fluitans(?) smothered byOedogoniumfilaments in Gossa Water, north Mainland, Shetland (HU 4354 6047). Gossa Water (one of five that share this name in the Shetland Islands!) is illustrated in the photograph at the top of this post.

The filamentous alga proved easier to unmask: the unbranched filaments, reticulate (net-like) chloroplasts and distinctive ‘cap cells’ all identifying it as the green alga Oedogonium.  As is often the case, however, the populations lacked any sexual organs so it was impossible to know which species (see “The perplexing case of the celibate alga“ and, for a rare case of a sexually-mature filament, “Love and sex in a tufa-forming stream”).   Abundant epiphytes can be another feature of Oedogonium: unlike several other filamentous green algae it produces little mucilage which makes it easier for diatoms, in particular, to colonise.  As well as colonies of needle-shaped cells of Fragilaria gracilis there were also several Achnanthidium cells and, entangled around the filaments and the moss, chains of Tabellaria flocculosa.   Given that the Oedogonium was, itself, an epiphyte, these diatoms are ‘hyperepiphytes’, a term that attracts remarkably few Google hits, almost all associated with lower plants.

The ‘cap cells’ are one of the most distinctive features of Oedogonium and results from a distinctive mode of cell division that leaves rings of scar tissue at the point where the two cells split.   That we see four or more of these scars on a few cells whilst the great majority have none suggests that we are looking at a primitive form of specialisation, with a few cells in a filament being responsible for all the cell division.  What is more, these cap cells are also often the ones that form oogonia (see “Love and sex in a tufa-forming stream” for an illustration of this) and asexual zoospores, so there must be something slightly different in the biochemistry within these cells that drives these processes.   However, at this point the formal scientific literature goes strangely silent apart from a single paper published in 1962.  Curiously, the evolution of multicellularity is one of those big questions that attract a lot of top academics (see the reference to a recent paper in Nature Scientific Reports below)  whilst a genus of algae that seem to show some faltering first steps towards specialisation of some cells are largely ignored.  Another case of the “trailing edge” of science?

Oedogonium filaments growing on Warnstofia fluitans in the littoral zone of Gossa Water, north Mainland, Shetland, May 2019.   The arrow on the top image shows the “cap cells”.   Note also the cluster of Fragilaria gracilis(plus a few cells of Achnanthidium) on the lowermost filament and, in the middle image, two of the many cells of Tabellaria flocculosa that were entangled with the Oedogonium filaments and moss stems.  Scale bar: 20 micrometres (= 1/50^thof a millimetre). 

A zoospore being released from a filament of Oedogonium.  This series of photographs was taken by me in about 1993 and I have no details of the location from which it came.  The filament is about 40 micrometres (= 1/25^thof a millimetre) in diameter.

Reference

Herron, M.D., Borin, J.M., Boswell, J.C., Walker, J., Chen, I-C. K., Knows, C.A., Boyd, M., Rosenzweig, F. & Ratcliff, W.C. (2019).  De novo origins of multicellularity in response to predation.  Nature Scientific Reports 9, Article number: 2328

Rawitscher-Kunkel, E. & Machlis, L. (1962).  The hormonal integration of sexual reproduction in Oedogonium.   American Journal of Botany 49: 177-183.

Sightseeing in Shetland: the tombolo (sandy isthmus) linking St Ninian’s Isle with Mainland in the Shetland Islands, May 2019.

Beyond the Tower of Babel …

A week after I return from China, I was off on my travels again; this time to Vienna for a workshop between molecular ecology specialists and ECOSTAT, the committee of Member State representatives who oversee ecological aspects of Water Framework Directive implementation.   As ever, I found some time to visit some art galleries around the meeting and, as Vienna has one of the most impressive collections of paintings by Pieter Brueghel, I could not resist spending some time in front of his “Tower of Babel”.  A few years ago I cheerfully included this picture in a talk on EU ecological assessment methods, as we tried to make sense of the myriad national approaches.   Three years after the Brexit vote, however, it seems to better reflect UK domestic politics where, ironically, language is one of the few things that all protagonists do have in common.

The River Danube seems to encapsulate the reasons why Europe needs collaborative thinking on the state of the environment.  It is the second longest river in Europe, after the Volga, and flows through ten countries, with tributaries extending into nine more.   Eight of the nine countries through which the river flows are members of the EU (the ninth, Serbia, is in the process of joining) so the river represents a case study, of sorts, on whether EU environmental policies actually work.   This is not just an academic question: ecologists are generally in favour of integrated management of entire catchments whilst the EU operates on a principle of “subsidiarity”, which means that decision-making is devolved to the lowest competent authority (individual Member States in the case of the environment).   Finding the right balance between these principles takes a lot of patient discussion and is one reason why EU decision-making can appear to be agonisingly slow.

Pieter Bruegel’s “Tower of Babel” in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

And there are more problems: the Water Framework Directive evaluates the sustainability of water bodies by their naturalness yet very large rivers such as the Danube have been very heavily modified by human use for centuries.   The river has been broadened, deepened and impounded, and its banks have been straightened and strengthened in order to make it navigable, and there is a huge human population, with associated industry, living on its banks.  The stretch of the Danube along which I walked on my last morning in Vienna was also lined with embankments to protect the surrounding land from flooding but these, at the same time, cut the river off from the ecological benefits of the floodplain.

What hope for a large river such as the Danube in the face of all these challenges?   First of all, when dealing with rivers such as these we need to adjust our expectations, recognising that they are so central to the economic life of the regions through which they flow that there are limits to their capacity to ever resemble truly natural rivers.   Once we have done this, we can start to unpick the challenges that can be addressed by individual Member States.  In the case of water quality, in particular, the story for the Danube is encouraging and European environmental legislation has played its role in this process.  By the time the Danube reaches the borders with Romania, for example, nutrient concentrations are low enough for many of the benthic algal-communities to meet criteria for “good ecological status”.

You can see this in the graph below, from a paper that we’ve published recently.   The Romanian sites are largely clustered at the top left hand side of the graph, relative to data from other countries – indicating low phosphorus concentrations and good ecology (expressed as “ecological quality ratios”, EQRs).   Thanks to an extensive exercise that took place a few years before I started grappling with the Romanian data, we already had a consensus view of the EQR boundaries for high and good status, and most of the Romanian data fits into the band representing “good status”.  That’s encouraging and whilst these communities are just one element of a much more complex ecosystem, but it is a clear step in the right direction.

The relationship between dissolved phosphorus and ecological status of the phytobenthos (expressed as the Ecological Quality Ratio, EQR, based on the intercalibration common metric (which gives a harmonised view of status between Member States).   Horizontal lines show the average position of “high” (blue) and “good” (green) status boundaries.   RO = Romanian data; XGIG = data from other Member States.   See Kelly et al. (2018) for more details.  

Romania is, of course, a long way downstream from where I was standing in Vienna.  Before the Danube gets there it has to cross Slovakia, Hungary and Serbia.  The river also forms the boundary between Romania and Bulgaria for about 300 kilometres, so it is important that there is joined-up thinking between those responsible for water quality on the two opposite banks.  That’s why the EU is so important for the environment on a pan-European scale.  It is easy for those of us crammed onto our insignificant archipelago in the north-west corner of the continent to overlook this, but the Danube is really a great success stories for European environmental collaboration and, indeed, a reason for staying with this ambitious project into the future.   Too late, I know, but it needs to be said.

Reference

Kelly, M.G., Chiriac, G., Soare-Minea, A., Hamchevici, C. & Birk, S. (2018).  Defining ecological status of phytobenthos in very large rivers: a case study of practical implementation of the Water Framework Directive in Romania.  Hydrobiologia 828: 353-367.

Sightseeing in Vienna: Stefansdom, the historic cathedral in the city centre and the Ferris wheel at the Prater amusement park, which played a starring role in Graham Greene’s The Third Man.