The difficulty of quantifying Diatoms

conundrum that has taken the world by storm. As of this semester, we as the Plankton Hui have been attempting to quantify diatoms. There are dozens upon dozens of diatom species that we find during a semester (across the previous three sites and semesters). Therefore, counting them all would be quite difficult. We noticed that there were three distinct species present even as the seasons changed, and we decided to count those instead of counting abundance of every taxa of diatoms in our samples.

Even with diluting and sub-sampling our plankton samples taken in the field and the few species we count, the process itself is more difficult than originally assumed. Usually, due to the plethora of zooplankton and phytoplankton alike, getting through the counts of an entire sub-sample can be difficult. Actually, this past week was the only time we have successfully counted an entire one milliliter sub-sample and only because the diatoms themselves were few and far between. Additionally, there was an abundance of Noctiluca or ‘sea sparkles,’ copepod adults and nauplii, along with barnacle nauplii, fish larvae, ostracods, and a jelly. Sometimes the phytoplankton congregate so compactly, the water in our samples appear to be almost jello-like.