Diatoms

Today I'm going to talk about the most abundant group I found during my research project and the most spectacular one because of his beauty: diatoms.

Diatoms constitute a very large number of species (about 10,000) grouped in 200 genera.
They can live in all kinds of wetlands sufficiently illuminated. Most of them form part of the plankton. His colour is yellow-green because of the pigments in their plasmids.
His most notable character is the presence of an external skeleton composed of silica (silicone dioxide, SiO2) called frustule. They are the most common species of phytoplankton and they represent the 45% of primary production of the oceans so they are very important producers. In addition, they are very used to study the water quality.

Here you can see some pictures I took of them:
Diatoms