My friends the diatoms …

Anyone that knows me knows my interest, fascination and utter respect for diatoms.

Consuming their oil and gas (which provide us with 70% of the worlds reserves) has led to our decline and theirs also. The irony is profound, yet no-one has ever seen a diatom without a microscope. Once seen never forgotten, but a topic badly taught at schools, at our place a small north country Secondary School circa 1969-74 the science teacher had us mostly playing hangman, i think his youth club admin had him otherwise enthralled.

Its my feeling that diatoms are on the wane, that diatoms are not adequetely reported and news of diatoms re scientific workers is woefully behing the curve (downward).

We haven’t got time for peer review and endless conferences overseas … get the bloody findings out into the public domain, we have not the time for surety.

I’m also sick and tired of hearing the lazy term ‘coral bleaching’ when I presume its the absence of diatoms that provide the symbiotic relatonship with Bryozoans ie coral builders and subsequent inhabitants.

https://psmag.com/environment/global-warming-is-putting-phytoplankton-in-danger

https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2343/study-shows-oceanic-phytoplankton-declines-in-northern-hemisphere/

https://phys.org/news/2018-03-key-biological-mechanism-disrupted-ocean.html

https://mashable.com/2018/03/16/ocean-acidification-could-hit-base-marine-food-web-diatoms/?europe=true

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rstb.2016.0397

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s