Plummercell Slide of Greenland Shelf objects

A new plummercell slide of foraminifera and other objects from the Greenland shelf is online. It has been provided by scientists who made a cruise in the Greeland Sea on R.V. Poseidon in 1995. The material was collected with an epibenthic sledge from the bottom of the Greenland Sea at 192m water-depth. The material was sorted and the single objects glued on the 36 fields of the plummercell slide by Karl-Otto Bock.

Find the plummercell slide with clickable single fields and classified foraminifera at Plummercell slide Greenland Shelf
Michael

Fossil Foraminifera from the South Yellow Sea

Gallitellia

Feifei Wang from the Qingdao Institute of Marine Geology in Qingdao, China has contributed 77 images of foraminifera. They lived on the seafloor of the South Yellow Sea in the Late Quaternary.

See all the images at www.foraminifera.eu/sys.php

579 Forams from Greece on a single slide

The huge foram collection of coworker Karl-Otto Bock is housed in single plummercell-slides, where forams are neatly arranged in single fields. We have started to put his collection online with this plummercell slide. It is filled primarily with miliolid specimens found at the beach of Malia on Crete - a Greece island. The single fields are clickable and are integrated into the foraminifera.eu database.



To see more follow the link and click on the single fields of the

Plummercell slide from Malia, Crete

.

Construction material of Foraminifera

Agglutinated Foraminifera build their test of particles cemented together. Some species use whatever particles are available, while other species may select only sponge spicules, diatoms, mica flakes or certain sized particles to build their test.



Rhabdammina abyssorum M. Sars, 1869 from the South China Sea (3465m depth) using diatoms and other particles to build its test. see the whole specimen



Saccorhiza ramosa (Brady, 1879) from the South China Sea (3465m depth) likes sponge spicules to build its test. see the whole specimen

Here we show recent foraminifera. The material used by fossil agglutinated foraminifera may be used for special investigations of past geological events. Such an example are shock-diamonds found in tests after the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary. The size of the diamonds found worldwide increase with proximity to the impact crater in Yucatan, Mexico. Source:

Kaminski, M.A., Armitage,D.A., Jones, A.P. (2008) Shocked Diamonds in agglutinated foraminifera from the Cretaceous/Paleogene Boundary, Italy - a preliminary report. In: Kaminski, M.A. & Coccioni, R. (eds). Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Agglutinated Foraminifera. Grzybowski Foundation Special Publication, 13, 265 pp.

Gulf Oil Spill: Recovery measurable by foraminifera

The University of California has issued a press release, that "
Tiny foraminifera shells can help assess recovery after oil spill. Millimeter-size marine organisms called foraminifera have been used to monitor pollutants in marshes and oceans, and could help to assess recovery in the Gulf of Mexico following the three-month long Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

That was the message from a French/American team of researchers who recently reported on the health of French marshes and mudflats 32 years after the Amoco Cadiz spilled 220,000 tons of oil along the Brittany coast in 1978."

"Our key to looking at these environments was the percentage of deformed foraminifera," said report co-author Jere Lipps, University of California, Berkeley, professor of integrative biology and an expert on foraminifera. "The percentage went way up during the oil spill, and then after about two years came back down to 2 or 3 percent, and that is where we see it today."

Read the whole story at UC Berkeley News


Deformed Elphidium from Kiel Fjord, Germany:

Foto courtesy of Irina from Irina Polovodova et. al., 2008: Foraminiferal test abnormalities in the western Baltic Sea in Journal of Foraminiferal Research, v. 38 (4), p. 318-336.
click here to see more images and read more

As pointed out in an earlier post, a great number of foraminifera are affected by the Gulf oil disaster. The comparison of the affected faunas now with those of the past and those in the future may provide a deep understanding of the impact and recovery processes.

Find more information on men-made pollution measured by foraminifera in the Mini-lecture: Foraminifera record pollution


Michael of foraminifera.eu