The sedimentary record of dinoflagellate cysts: looking back into the future of phytoplankton blooms*

By B. Dale. 2001

128 citations recorded by the source corpus.

SUMMARY: Marine systems are not as well understood as terrestrial systems, and there is still a great need for more primary observations, in the tradition of the old-time naturalists, before newer methods such as molecular genetics and modeling can be fully utilized. The scientific process whereby the smaller, detailed “building blocks” of observation are ultimately linked towards better understanding natural systems is illustrated from my own career experience, especially with regard to the dinoflagellates and plankton blooms. Some dinoflagellates produce a fossilizable resting stage (cyst) in their life cycle, and dinoflagellate cysts have become one of the most important groups of microfossils used in geological exploration (e.g. oil and gas). This has stimulated both paleontological and biological research producing detailed “building blocks” of information, currently scattered throughout the respective literature. Here, I attempt to bring together the present day perspective, from biology, with the past, from paleontology, as the most comprehensive basis for future work on the group. This shows the cysts to be the critical link needed for focusing future molecular genetics studies towards a more verifiable view of evolutionary pathways, and it also suggests new integrated methods for studying past, present, and future blooms. The large, rapidly growing field of harmful algal bloom studies is producing many different “building blocks”, but plankton blooms as episodic phenomena are still poorly understood. This is largely due to the general lack of long-term datasets allowing identification of the changing environmental factors that permit certain species to bloom at unpredictable intervals of time. Cysts in sediments are useful environmental indicators today, e.g. reflecting aspects of climate and pollution, and provide information directly relevant to some dinoflagellate blooms. They therefore may be used for obtaining retrospective information from the sedimentary record on the history of blooms, in turn suggesting information relevant for future blooms and the way we study them.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/096d34591857b054ffd9b3f4f5a3bf2d60f47fa9

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Citations in the corpus

Phytoplankton community ecology: principles applied in San Francisco Bay (2005, unknown): “Sustained observations and examination of microfossils in the sedimentary record (e.g. Dale 2001) have since revealed that communities and seasonal patterns change, sometimes dramatically, and that these shifts are coherent with annual variability and interdecadal trends of climate change (McGowan…”
OCEAN CLIMATE CHANGE, PHYTOPLANKTON COMMUNITY RESPONSES, AND HARMFUL ALGAL BLOOMS: A FORMIDABLE PREDICTIVE CHALLENGE 1 (2010, background): “However, we can learn important lessons from the dinoflagellate cyst fossil record (Dale 2001), from the few long-term data sets available, such as the Continuous Plankton Recorder surveys (Hays et al. 2005) and short-term phytoplankton community responses to ENSO and NAO episodes.”
Climate Change and Harmful Algal Blooms (2006, background): “This is very similar to the eutrophication signal described elsewhere ( Dale 2001 ), but there was no evidence of eutrophication, despite the obvious influence of Baltic water reported by others to be eutrophic (Elmgren 2001).”
Reconstructing 150 years of eutrophication in the north-western Adriatic Sea (Italy) using dinoflagellate cysts, pollen and spores (2004, background): “…bentorii and S. lazus (temperate coastal species) display a marked decreasing trend towards the top of the core, while the warm water indicator S. mirabilis and the cold-temperate water species S. membranaceus (e.g., Thorsen et al., 1995; Dale, 2001b) have fairly stable values throughout the core.”