Sentences with phrase «pfiesteria dinoflagellate»

The Dino Sphere is an incredible, living object that's filled with thousands of non-toxic plankton organisms called Dinoflagellates.

These bioluminescent dinoflagellates emit beautiful blue light at night when swirled in the dark.

The fossil record showed that before the ice emerged, some dinoflagellates produced their own energy via photosynthesis; others fed on photosynthesising algae.

Dinoflagellates eat these blooms and are then set upon by swarms of krill, which, in turn, are eaten by many larger animals, including baleen whales.

Sander Houben of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues studied fossilised dinoflagellates — a type of plankton — in sediment cores from the Antarctic seabed to find out how these changes affected marine life.

Dinophysis shellfish toxins (okadaic acid and derivatives) cause diarrhetic shellfish poisoning and are produced by marine dinoflagellates in the genus Dinophysis.

Tiny dinoflagellates seem to use their bioluminescence to the same effect, «like a scream,» Widder says.

«The suckers actually twinkle, and they look like the dinoflagellates on which copepods feed,» Widder says.

Creatures grazing on the dinoflagellates «don't want to be lit up and munched on» by other predators, she says.

Some of the lights were tiny: The flash of a dinoflagellate is just a tenth of a millionth of a watt and lasts but a tenth of a second.

From her graduate study of dinoflagellates, Widder knew that an animal's first flash is the brightest and that to obtain clear readings, the creature must be stimulated and contained long enough to measure all the light given off.

When predators try to eat them, the dinoflagellates flash, lighting up the water.

One possibility could be related to dinoflagellates and cyanobacteria found upstream in the catchment, which might be releasing toxins similar to those that cause red tides in marine environments, says Peter Ashton, a water resources specialist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in South Africa and the University of Pretoria.

Stoecker says that there has been circumstantial evidence that dinoflagellates use their toxins to capture prey, but notes that Sheng's work is «pretty cool» because of the detailed visualizations and quantitative data.

Biophysicist Jian Sheng of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and his colleagues studied toxic and non-toxic strains of a dinoflagellate species, found in Chesapeake Bay on the eastern US coast, called Karlodinium veneficum.

Although many dinoflagellates can survive through photosynthesis alone, some species are able to grow twice as fast by preying on other algae — and it is this feeding mechanism that is now thought to be aided by the production of toxins.

Florida's coastline has frequent outbreaks of the toxic dinoflagellate Karenia brevis, whose toxins can escape into the air and cause severe respiratory distress.

Although this may be bad news for the Baltic Sea and other areas plagued by this dinoflagellate, Kremp also noted that the short duration of most lab studies limits what we can know about how toxic algae may evolve over the next century.

To get a feel for what scientists are up against, start with the photos, a gallery of rogues that poison their enemies — such as the dinoflagellate Alexandrium tamarense — or stab them to death — including a Chaetoceros species that plunges its serrated spines into the gills of fish.

Another possibility is that the toxins are simply a way for a diatom or dinoflagellate to store excess nutrients, such as carbon or nitrogen, rather than a stress response, says microbial ecologist William Cochlan of San Francisco State University.

He found that warm - water phytoplankton, known as dinoflagellates, were replaced during that time by species from the colder waters of the North Atlantic.

Dinoflagellates are also known for their diversity.

Out of the vast diversity of plankton in the oceans, the worst offenders are a few species of diatoms, dinoflagellates and cyanobacteria, collectively called harmful algae.

Other widespread population buildups can be toxic — as in May when a bloom of dinoflagellates covered nearly 4,000 square miles off China with a so - called red tide that killed off millions of fish.

• Dinoflagellates.

Scanning electron microscope (SEM) images of the three main groups of large phytoplankton — diatoms, dinoflagellates, and coccolithophorids (those with coccolith shells)-- show that they can be arrestingly beautiful.

Coccolithophorids and dinoflagellates are largely marine plants, meaning they live in salt water.

Temperature - stressed corals will discharge their dinoflagellate partners, resulting in coral «bleaching,» but the organisms can also live independently and may do so more easily in an ocean where CO2 is becoming more readily available.

Dinoflagellates can look like anything from dimpled pollen grains to minuscule ship anchors.

Dinoflagellates like Peridinium furca are best known for two transparent whiplike flagella — one that encircles the body, the other arising from between the two points.

As a next step, the team aims to introduce genetic mutations that are capable of reversing uracil deficiency in the mutant dinoflagellate, which may provide clues for identifying algal genes responsible for symbiosis.

«First we established an efficient method for culturing dinoflagellate cells in our lab,» said Shinichiro Maruyama, an assistant professor at Tohoku University.

Two are caused by dinoflagellate species, Prorocentrum minimum and Kalrodinium veneficum, and the third by cyanobacteria, sometimes called blue - green algae.

Most of the vibrant color probably comes from algae living in the single - celled bodies of the dinoflagellate Noctiluca scintillans.

Strictly speaking, Pfiesteria is not an alga but belongs to a group of single - celled organisms called dinoflagellates.

The geographic area impacted by these blooms of the dinoflagellate Alexandrium expanded dramatically in 1972 as a result of Hurricane Carrie.

That is how the dinoflagellates that cause toxic «red tides» spread round the globe, how Chinese mitten crabs reached Europe, how Asian kelp made it to southern Australia, and how Mediterranean mussels came to carpet the coast of South Africa.

Until now, how dinoflagellates acquired and fired these projectiles, called extrusomes, was unclear.

Clockwise from mushroom at bottom: Amanita muscaria, giant panda, Desmarella, Euglena, Giardia, Trichomonas, star sand foram, Allogromia foram, Globigerina foram, Colpidium ciliates, Stentor, dinoflagellate, Coscinodiscus, Stephanodiscus, giant kelp, Gephyrocapsa, Ceratolithus, Phaeocystis, Magnolia, Galaxaura red seaweed, Scenedesmus green algae, Entamoeba, Tubulifera slime mold, Chaos amoeba.

Here, a dinoflagellate population (Noctiluca sp.) turns the ocean a luminous blue color as the disturbance by the wind triggers a light - generating chemical reaction.

In fact, structurally comparable weapons systems, called nematocysts as well, are found in a group of modern protozoans, the dinoflagellates.

Several large dinoflagellate species hunt despite living inside a rigid shell.

«The stinging nematocysts of cnidarians closely resemble those of dinoflagellates, but the ballistic mechanisms are different and they don't appear to share any genes.»

Further research would look at more species of dinoflagellates with extrusomes, attempting to obtain a better understanding of their diversity and evolutionary history.

Whereas the acceleration of cnidarian nematocysts is driven by high internal pressure, the dinoflagellates lack the necessary metabolic pathways.

The production of light is thought to attract fish predators that prey on potential predators of the dinoflagellates.»

In their analysis, the Heidelberg group, together with a group from the University of British Columbia in Canada, showed that the cnidaria and dinoflagellates use entirely different genes and proteins to construct their respective miniature harpoons.

The dinoflagellate Polykrikos lebouriae, for example, ejects a pointed projectile.

Gavelis and colleagues studied two types of dinoflagellates: Polykrikos kofoidii and Nematodinium sp..

The team speculates that the eye - like structures help warnowiids detect their dinoflagellate prey and send chemical messages to communicate with other parts of the cell.