Monday night with the Boys

Out Monday to celebrate the acceptance of a paper by Mike Z in no less than Nature. He's done some rather careful laboratory work that finds that small eukaryotic autotrophs (flagellates) are actually moonlighting as the study system's major herbivores (grazing on bacterial cells). In fact, they are more important than closely related and co-occurring bona fide heterotrophic flagellates. Mike believes this is related to the oligotrophic status of the waters they occur in: simply put, bacterial cells are a better source of phosphorus than seawater. Coupled to the fact that bacterial cells appear better able to acquire phosphorus from seawater than the flagellates (so effectively serve as the middleman for flagellate phosphorus supply).

Anyway, photographs were taken. First up: Adrian and Mike ...



Adrian, Bablu and Mike ...