News

Today, the second part of the UN Biodiversity Conference (CBD COP 15) starts in Montreal. In previous negotiations, inland waters have not been given sufficient consideration – even though they harbour a particularly high biodiversity and provide vital ecosystem services for humans. IGB scientists researching freshwater biodiversity provide an overview of this often overlooked topic.

Researchers from IGB and the Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) in Poznań (Poland) tested whether water fleas (Daphnia) are more frequently infected by the parasite Caullerya mesnili in warmer waters. For the infected water fleas, the disease usually ends fatally.

Long thought to rely solely on photosynthesis, the microbe Prochlorococcus may get as much as one-third of its carbon through a second strategy: consuming the dissolved remains of other dead microbes.

IGB’s LakeLab in Lake Stechlin, containing “24 lakes within a lake”, is globally unique. This year, the large-scale experimental facility is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Reason enough to look at the past and the future with Mark Gessner, head of the “Plankton and Microbial Ecology” department at Lake Stechlin and initiator of the LakeLab.

A Chinese team, in collaboration with IGB researcher Sabine Hilt, has shown in a large mesocosm experiment how heat waves, nutrients and pesticides promote algae growth and cause aquatic plants to dwindle. This shift in plant types may increase the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions from shallow lakes, as Sabine Hilt and Dutch colleagues demonstrated in another mesocosm experiment.