This comprehensive book provides a unique overview of advances in the biology and ecology of marine protists. Nowadays marine protistology is a hot spot in science to disclose life phenomena using the latest techniques. Although many protistological textbooks deal with the cytology, genetics, ecology, and pathology of specific organisms, none keeps up with the quick pace of new discoveries on the diversity and dynamics of marine protists in general. The bookMarine Protists: Diversity and Dynamics gives an overview of current research on the phylogeny, cytology, genomics, biology, ecology, fisheries, applied sciences, geology and pathology of marine free-living and symbiotic protists. Poorly known but ecologically important protists such as labyrinthulids and apostome ciliates are also presented in detail. Special attention is paid to complex interactions between marine protists and other organisms including human beings. An understanding of the ecological roles of marine protists is essential for conservation of nature and human welfare. This book will be of great interest not only to scientists and students but also to a larger audience, to give a better understanding of protists’ diverse roles in marine ecosystems.

Planktonic protists both produce and consume most of the primary production in the world ocean. They not only play key roles in the oceans but also represent an astounding amount of diversity: ecological morphological and genetic. However, for most taxa their ecology, morphology, phylogeny and biogeography are either poorly known or appear to be largely unrelated to one another; this hinders our understanding of their biology as well as interpretation of emerging genetic data. Tintinnid ciliates represent a singular exception. Compared to nearly all other groups of planktonic protists, there is a very substantial and relatively detailed literature (both modern and historical) on tintinnids. This volume synthesizes knowledge concerning a wide variety of topics ranging from anatomy and systematics, physiology, behavior, ecology (including ecological roles, predators, parasites, biogeography, and cysts) to fossil history. It will appeal to an audience ranging from advanced undergraduates to researchers in the fields of Oceanography, Marine Biology and Microbial Ecology.

A comprehensive guide to the protists that live in the surface waters and sea-ice south of the Antarctic Polar Front.

The third edition of this bestselling text has been rigorously updated to reflect major new discoveries and concepts since 2011, especially progress due to extensive application of high-throughput sequencing, single cell genomics and analysis of large datasets. Significant advances in understanding the diversity and evolution of bacteria, archaea, fungi, protists, and viruses are discussed and their importance in marine processes is explored in detail. Now in full colour throughout, all chapters have been significantly expanded, with many new diagrams, illustrations and boxes to aid students’ interest and understanding. Novel pedagogy is designed to encourage students to explore current high-profile research topics. Examples include the impacts of rising CO2 levels on microbial community structure and ocean processes, interactions of microbes with plastic pollution, symbiotic interactions, and emerging diseases of marine life. This is the only textbook addressing such a broad range of topics in the specific area of marine microbiology, now a core topic within broader Marine Science degrees. A Companion Website provides additional online resources for instructors and students, including a summary of key concepts and terminology for each chapter, links to further resources, and flashcards to aid self-assessment.

The oceans are microbial-dominated ecosystems, where protists (single-celled eukaryotes) play fundamental roles performing multiple functions as primary producers, consumers, decomposers as well as trophic linkers in aquatic food webs. Due to their ecological relevance, it is important to characterize protist communities along temporal and spatial gradients to understand their biogeography and dynamics. This will allow us to infer the processes that drive the assembly of protist communities. In this dissertation, we focused in the study of natural protists communities aiming to understand their distributions and responses within different dimensions. We first focused in the temporal dimension, analyzing the dynamics of pico- and nanoeukaryotic communities, aiming to characterize the diverse strategies of their members and to determine seasonality. We identified an annual seasonal pattern in the protist community as well as in several composing taxa. Then, we addressed the spatial dimension, analyzing the changes in community composition along the water column in 13 stations distributed in the global ocean, exploring also the vertical variation in the relative metabolic activity of different taxa. Our results showed a clear vertical stratification of the community and indicated that the mesopelagic layer is the region with the highest metabolic activity. Another aim of this thesis was to explore the response of natural protists to chemical gradients. The ocean is a complex ecosystem with nutrients heterogeneously distributed along several patches, so there may be a lot of chemical gradients promoting diverse responses on marine microbes. For that purpose, we performed chemotactic experiments to identify individual responses towards different attractants within a natural protist community. The experimental results showed a preferential response towards some of the tested chemical cues, mainly bacterial exudates. Finally, since studies on microbial diversity generally use the relative abundances of phylotypes in a given sample, we explored the relationship between the latter relative abundances to cell abundances in several chosen taxa. In sum, this dissertation determines temporal and spatial patterns in protists communities as well as chemotactic preferences in different taxa, contributing to broaden our understanding of the structuring processes operating across temporal, spatial and behavioral dimensions in the protist world.

Concepts of Biology is designed for the single-semester introduction to biology course for non-science majors, which for many students is their only college-level science course. As such, this course represents an important opportunity for students to develop the necessary knowledge, tools, and skills to make informed decisions as they continue with their lives. Rather than being mired down with facts and vocabulary, the typical non-science major student needs information presented in a way that is easy to read and understand. Even more importantly, the content should be meaningful. Students do much better when they understand why biology is relevant to their everyday lives. For these reasons, Concepts of Biology is grounded on an evolutionary basis and includes exciting features that highlight careers in the biological sciences and everyday applications of the concepts at hand.We also strive to show the interconnectedness of topics within this extremely broad discipline. In order to meet the needs of today's instructors and students, we maintain the overall organization and coverage found in most syllabi for this course. A strength of Concepts of Biology is that instructors can customize the book, adapting it to the approach that works best in their classroom. Concepts of Biology also includes an innovative art program that incorporates critical thinking and clicker questions to help students understand--and apply--key concepts.