Foraminifera.eu Newsletter is out

The Foraminifera.eu Newsletter 2010/2011 is out.

It tells you the main stories of 2010, portrays contributors, reports about the activities such as at FORAMS 2010 and the exhibition. A lookout on 2011 is made.

Get it here

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

Forams2010

From 5th till 10th of September 2010 the Foram-World met in Bonn. 374 professional foraminiferologist plus 1 amateur (=me) met in Bonn to learn more about newest scientific results about foraminifera and their applications. Martin Langer and his team did an excellent job in organizing this event as a vivid platform for scientific and personal exchange. The opportunity was given to everbody to present his/her work as an oral and/or poster presentation. During poster sessions no oral sessions were running. The resulting richness of the scientific input is reflected in the reader of Forams2010 with more abstracts than participants.

My poster presentation

from Sunday till Tuesday was well visited by about 50 persons with 15 wanting to contribute mainly images and minilectures. Online now (8.9.) went the Short Treatise on foraminiferology offered by Bruno Granier on the 6.9. with the integration of all single images still under way. A cooperation with the eforams-project (Jaroslav Tyszka) is agreed, with foraminifera.eu as a plattform to pre-present new, not yet accepted species. Feedback: Via internet people tend to be very polite avoiding any criticsm, which is needed though to move on in a project like foraminifera.eu. So I took the chance to ask for feedback. As one result I will add an FAQ to answer the many questions. "What happens to my contribution, when you are run over by a truck ? Who finances all this ? Is your plan to add 10.000 Ammonias as they will be in many samples ? Who is reviewing the classifications ? How may I send my images ?

Imaging:

With Thomas Cedhagen, Miroslav Bubik and an unfortunately to me unknown retired lady from Shell I intensively talked about imaging, stacking, digitalizing of collections and the importance of drawings. Bob Jones will ask the NHML on the permission to use their scans of the Brady Challenger Expedition drawings. See a first image of Lituotuba lituiformis, taken from a different publication as indicated :)

Meeting with contributors + Urbino 09 course participants.

It was a great pleasure to meet some of the first scientific contributors, for the first time Irina Polovodova and now twice since Urbino 2009 Renata Moura Mello, Ekaterina Ovsepyan and Claudia Cetean. Alltogether 9 Urbino 2009 participants were present and presenting their work.

Field trip to the chalk-quarry Laegerdorf

In July our small group of hobby-micropaleontologists heads to the chalk-quarry Laegerdorf near Hamburg: doors are open, it its collectors Sunday. While our macropaleontological colleagues are already busy with their heavy equipment and first findings of belemnites are reported we discuss the stratigrafical setting:





















We soon skip our plan to match stratigrafical maps in the literature with sampling in the quarry. We do a chronological sampling and hope, that the micropaleontological content will tell us more.










After 7 hours of continous sampling we have 15 bags of 500g. Mircofossils are not observable, with a magnifying glas: 0,00.
What have you got ? is the question of our colleagues with the buckets full of belemnits, starfish, sponges ...
Yeah , oh my god - us ? - we don't know ...

Our field trip starts back home. After cleaning, washing, sieving of 1/3 of the first bag a residue with fraction > 63µm is left:




















In three such spoons we find hundreds of foraminifera and other microfossil specimens. Cleaning needs to be improved though.

Some prominent index foraminifera for the Lower Upper Campanian/ Upper lower Campanian found are these:


Neoflabellina buticula






Stensioeina pommerana







Bolivinoides decoratus (var. decoratus ?)





Learn more about our findings at
Laegerdorf Sample 22

Globorotalia truncatulinoides

Globorotalia truncatulinoides (d'Orbigny, 1839) is a planktic foraminifera.

It tolerates a broad range of sea surface temperatures and salinities and occurs in subtropical and transitional water masses. It is a deep-dwelling species which ascends to shallower depths during its reproduction period in winter. In the fossil record it is since the Pleistocene and may be used for studies on climate change of the last 2 mya.

The relative abundance of dextral coiling is higher at lower latitudes.

The specimens shown here are from a sample from the Hebridian Slope off Scotland in the North Atlantic. Northwest of the British Isles, this steep continental slope to depths greater than 2000 m separates the distinct continental shelf of Europe from the deeper Atlantic Ocean. The sample is in the repository of the Scottish Association for Marine Sciences, Oban.

see more foraminifera found at the Hebridian Slope









Umbilical view of a
dextral coiling specimen
















Spiral View

















more images of Globorotalia truncatulinoides at
Laboratório de Microfósseis Calcários,
Rio Grande do Sul, Brasil

Exhibition Foraminifera of Northern Germany

Opening:
Saturday, 7th of August 2010 at 14.00h

Ice Age Museum Lütjenburg/Germany
www.eiszeitmuseum.de

Foraminifera objects
by artist Anna Mandel
www.annamandel.de

Contact me, if you want to organize an exhibition where you are. Michael:
michael [at] foraminifera.eu

More Info

Classical Site: Damery - Fleury-la-Rivière

A classical site for (micro-) paleontological research is the area Damery - Fleury-la-Rivière in the Paris Basin. It is famous for rich fossil beds of Lutetian Age (48.6 - 40.4 mya). In the 19th century pre-evolutionist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), the author of many first descriptions of species Alcide Dessalines d'Orbigny, Olry Terquem (1797-1886) and others worked on fossil foraminifera of the Paris Basin.

The foraminiferal fauna indicates shallow water, warm marine conditions such as found today in the Red Sea: a great variety, rich ornamented and big foraminifera, a substantial part being Miliolids.






Ornamented Miliolid: Miliola prisca (Terquem, 1882)
















Unornamented, rather large Miliolid: Triloculina trigonula (Lamarck, 1804)

















Trochulina turbo (d'Orbigny, 1826), umbilical side















Trochulina turbo (d'Orbigny, 1826), spiral side













See more images on Fleury-la-Rivière

The sediment-sample was sent by Adrian, Thanks a lot !