Pearson College Marine Science

The margins of Pedder Bay have been quite red recently…

This is due to a bloom of Mesodinium rubrum, a little red-coloured ciliate.

Kyle collected a bucket of water off the dock on 7 March 2013 which had some Mesodinium rubrum and looked like this:

And then again today (11 March), which looked like this:

Compared to tap water:

This is not a harmful species, but it does colour the water as a ‘red tide’.

For more information see the UBC Phytopedia entry for Myrionecta rubra.  (I love the lifestyle description of ‘kleptochloroplastidic’ which means stealing chloroplasts!)  It’s also worth doing a Google image search for Mesodinium rubrum to see images of individual ciliates and of other water coloured by blooms of Mesodinium rubrum.

Tags: ciliate, Mesodinium rubrum, Myrionecta rubra, Pedder Bay, plankton, plankton bloom, red tide

This entry was posted on March 11, 2013 at 5:10 pm and is filed under Events, Marine organisms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.