Siliceous and Delicious

It’s been a long slump. And, though I somehow feel like I’ve said this often before, it feels like it’s been a real low point. But after a really great DSA yesterday, I feel much buoyed by my recognition of my own resilience, thanks to Beau’s really rather brilliant question (“if the wiser and capable self you know is in there could meet the you in the fog, what would you say to yourself to get yourself out of this funk?”). I haven’t yet formulated the pep-talk/positive inner monologue reprogramming incantation yet, but something about realizing that the power to get myself out of this mess lies within myself seems to have rattled something loose. Achingly, grindingly, things are starting to ease back into motion.

I tidied up the spreadsheet for the morphospace matrix to ready it for an influx of new (Cretaceous) taxa. I dug up the papers with Cretaceous occurrences. In the first one (Fourtanier, 1991), I chased down all of the references to other Cretaceous diatom occurrences that I hadn’t seen yet, and found they were all dead ends (well—the Barron, 1985 reference about the CESAR core from Alpha Ridge is published in an obscure book which I think I can’t be bothered to track down). Moved on to look at what genera are actually listed in the Cretaceous samples. The genera are Coscinodiscus, Eunotogramma, Gladius, Hemiaulus, Pterotheca, Pyxidicula, Rhizosolenia, Stephanopyxis, Triceratium, and Trinacria. Remarkably enough, only Eunotogramma, Gladius, Pyxidicula (though this seems to be similar to and perhaps synonymous with Stephanopyxis) are new. Phew. I think Pterotheca might be a resting stage, but I need to check when I’m back at the office.

Next, the second Cretaceous assemblage (Hajós and Stradner, 1975). This one lists a heaped metric assload of taxa. Including these ones not already in the morphospace: Acanthodiscus, Cerataulina, Creataulus, Epithelion, Goniothecium (isn’t that a resting stage, too?), Helminthopsis, Horodiscus, Incisoria, Kentrodiscus, Longinata, Odontropis (hmmm? sounds familiar), Poretzkia, Pseudopyxilla, Pteritheca, Pyrgodiscus, and Rattrayella. Holy shit. That’s fourteen new genera, at least. Yech. Si, se puede. Onwards! Oh. Missed a page. Tubularia, and Xanthiopyxis, which I’m pretty sure is a resting stage taxon.

And, the third assemblage, Gersonde and Harwood (1990). The most famous one. Here we have Amblypyrgus, Ancylopyrgus, Archepyrgus, Basilicostephanus, Bilingua, Gladiopsis, Kerkis, Kreagra, Microorbis, Praethalassiosiropsis, Rhynchopyxis, and Trochus. Yikes. That makes a total of 33 more genera to code up. Barf, barf, barf. Si, se puede.

Well, it ain’t pretty, and it ain’t much, but at least I’ve done something today. Better than the last few weeks. Things are moving upwards. Hey, ho, let’s go!