News

Happy Birthday LakeLab! For a decade now, IGB has been conducting large-scale experiments on the impacts of climate change and other anthropogenic environmental changes on lake ecosystems at the IGB LakeLab in Lake Stechlin. In this brief interim account, we present the projects, scientific findings and new perspectives that have emerged from research conducted in the facility so far. It is a journey through time on the occasion of the first big anniversary.

IGB has provided feedback on the government draft of the National Water Strategy, emphasising, among other things, the relevance of aquatic biodiversity and the large practical implementation deficit in water management.

No life has yet been found on Mars, but it is exciting to explore under what circumstances it might be possible. A team has studied the cellular processes that regulate the adaptation of microorganisms to perchlorates. If microorganisms could genetically adapt their stress response to this salt, which occurs in some deserts and on Mars, their survival on the red planet would be possible.

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.