Siliceous and Delicious

Arrived at work just in time for a meeting with Jacques about the diatom sonication project and what next steps to take, now that the culture is harvested and seems finally to be close to departing for Boston. Jacques agreed with my plans for cleaning, then sonicating the frustules at various intensities, though he made the very helpful suggestions to a) look at them under the light microscope to check initially how well the sonication has worked, and b) rather than sonicating different samples at different intensities, and then examining the results (which is what I had in mind), sonicate for a couple of seconds, examine a little bit, then sonicate some more, etc. This seems like a much more sample-efficient way to deal with the problem of finding the right sonication intensity/time.

The rest of the day just wouldn’t take. Read the papers for lab meeting this afternoon, but found them to be utterly uninteresting, even though they’re closer up my street (research-wise) than anything else we’ve read for lab meeting in months. Then sat in front of Dave’s paper, agonizing over what I should write in response. “Thanks for the vision of doom, Dave, that’s great. We can’t do macroevolutionary studies on microfossils”.

The abstract is good. The introduction is fine, outlines what’s been done with microfossil data and what Neptune is. The section on “The pelagic realm” is clumsily written, but makes the point that lots of the known protist groups are in the plankton, and that they’re quite widespread in oceanic provinces. Their populations are large. The “Preservation of pelagic marine plankton…” section makes the good point that only a few of the groups of planktonic protists actually have a fossil record at all, five out of twenty-six protist groups, as compared to 10 (20 including Lagerstätten) out of 30 metazoan phyla in the marine shelf record.

“Preservation at the species level” starts with the distinction in importance of species between micropaleontology and animal paleontology—with the assertion that species don’t matter much to most paleontologists, but are crucial to microfossil workers. I’m not 100% sure I agree with this. Aren’t the exact same sort of morphospecies just as important in ammonites, for example?