Three weeks of warm weather had left my pond covered with large slimy masses of 'blanket weed' or 'pond scum', the filamentous green algae that tend to plague ponds that have too much nitrogen in the water. When I'd fished most of it out I took a look at a few filaments under the microscope and - like so many living organisms - it revealed structures of great beauty when it was magnified a few hundred times. Inside each cell in the filament the chloroplasts were arranged like strings of green pearls. Various filamentous algae have chloroplasts in different conformations and the most familiar is the spiral chloroplast in Spirogyra..... but this is a different genus.....
The series of fine rings that you can see around the bottom of the upper cell on the left here, just above its junction with the cell below it, identify this alga as a species of Oedogonium. A ring forms each time a cell of this genus divides, so this cell appears to have divided three times.
In amongst the algal filaments there were also desmids - this crescent moon-shaped example is Closterium. The clear areas at the tips of the 'moon' are vacuoles, that contain insoluble crystals of calcium sulphate - a diagnostic feature of this genus.
The most interesting alga in my pond, however, was this one - Coleochaete. It may look like just a pad of simple cells (with some of them apparently dead) but this is an organism of great evolutionary significance. Modern molecular biological studies, and comparative investigations into the ways in which cells divide in this species and in land plants, indicate that Coleochaete shares a common ancestor with present day land plants - mosses, liverworts, ferns, conifers and flowering plants. At some point - maybe half a billion years ago - algae like this, perhaps living in a warm pool of nutrient-rich water like my garden pond, started to colonise the mud and begin the long series of evolutionary changes that led to the development of today's terrestrial vegetation.
A discovery like this makes the chore of cleaning out the garden pond a whole lot more interesting..........
