News

How do you find food when the food is never exactly present at the same place or time? Looking at wild guppies, the solution seems to be: being social and surrounding yourself with females.

Ulrike Berninger, Professor of Ecology at the University of Salzburg in Austria, has long been interested in mixotrophic plankton. This refers to the small organisms floating in water that combine the properties of both zooplankton and phytoplankton. Depending on the environmental situation or individual requirements, these unicellular organisms can either take up food particles via phagocytosis or carry out photosynthesis using sunlight.

Doerthe Tetzlaff, head of IGB's Ecohydrology department for one year, has been honoured with the American Geophysical Union's Fellowship – as the first ever female hydrologist in Germany.

Fish are an important element in the food web of lakes. This also applies to the experimental enclosures of the LakeLab. However, in this case, the number of fish must be controlled so that the results from the individual cylinders can be compared with each other. Because fish from the lake repeatedly jump into the enclosures, all fish must first be removed with nets from the cylinders before starting a new experiment. Today, 5 small perch were released into each enclosure for this year's LakeLab experiment.

As energy supplier and stimulus of the internal clock, light is of fundamental importance to plants and animals. This also applies to fish and microscopic organisms in lakes. Like other species, they have adapted to the day-night rhythm during evolution. But what happens if a lake is illuminated by artificial lighting at night, or if not enough light penetrates into the water during the day? These questions are examined during this year's summer experiment at the Lake Lab.

A team of international media companies (amongst them the NDR, WDR and Süddeutsche Zeitung) has recently investigated the acitivities of so called predatory publishers in the science system worldwide. Fortunately, there has been no case of predatory publishing at IGB so far - not least due to our library information and advice services on the selection of respectable journals.

Today 97 young scientists from across Europe start studying the society’s perception of ecosystem services provided by urban ponds, as well their ecological status.

Fisheries scientists have studied the response of fish in the Mediterranean Sea to spearfishing. The fish are able to finely discriminate if divers carry a speargun or not and adjust their escape behaviour.