Studies on fragile unicellular marine plankton : fauna and population dynamics

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Among the unicellular marine plankton, I have been focusing on naked spirotrich ciliates (class Spirotrichea), which are extremely fragile but universally occurred in the surface ocean, and have cleared their fauna through some improvements of staining and observation methods. The main results obtained in this study are as follows : (1) occurrence-and-disappearance characters in many species are strongly depending on salinity environment (rather than temperature) around the coastal area of Nagasaki, (2) spirotrich ciliates are favorably grazing on small-sized diatoms with their smoothed outline among various types of diatoms, (3) intra-species variations were more or less observed in many species and the extend of variation was estimated through the accurate morphometric description.