Marine Plankton Ciliates from European Coastal Waters

Ciliates are highly evolved, single-celled organisms (Protozoa) inhabiting a great variety of biotopes. The species living in the marine plankton are very numerous (about 2,200 species) and an important link in the transfer of material through the food web. They are, however, poorly known and difficult to identify because most descriptions are very old and not adequate basing on live or preserved material only. Nowadays, additional cell features necessary to distinguish the often very similar species unequivocally can be revealed by silver impregnation techniques. The application of these methods will also help to base the systematic of the species-rich, house-forming tintinnid ciliates on reasonable cell features and not any longer on characteristics of their highly variable houses only. Pilot studies conducted by the applicant showed also several as yet undescribed species in the North Sea plankton. The objectives of the proposed project can be summarized as follows: the description of about 50 mainly new planktonic ciliate species (Protozoa, Ciliophora) collected at several sites in European coastal waters on highest scientific level; the application of enzyme electrophoresis in certain taxa to elucidate their difficult taxonomy and phylogenetic relationships; the determination of the biodiversity of planktonic ciliates in European coastal waters and their biogeographical distribution; the results will be published as individual papers in scientific journals "user-friendly", illustrated data-sheets of the taxa will be placed on a web site of the Natural History Museum, London, to serve the scientific community the European Register of Marine Species (ERMS) will be completed. The applicant worked on taxonomy of ciliates from marine and brackish water plankton, Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, and soils collected world-wide. The working group of Prof. Dr. Wilhelm Foissner at the Zoological Institute of the University of Salzburg has published more than 450 papers and books mainly on ciliate taxonomy during the past 33 years. The papers are of high quality and appeared usually in reviewed, international journals. Prof Foissner has experience in studying ciliates and his laboratory is in this respect unique world-wide.