Amy Shields, a graduate student with Dr. Kam Tang of William and Mary College, showed me around her lab and told me about her research with a particular type of phytoplankton called Phaeocystis antarctica. This tiny one-celled plant is at the bottom of the marine Antarctic food chain, but not much is known about this particular species. This organism has a period where it wanders around as a single cell, but later it seems to clump together with others of its species into a colony and secrete mucous to hold the colony together. The colonies are yellowish. They take up carbon and produce volatile organic sulfur into the water. The group is looking at whether the solitary forms differ from the group forms in growth, composition or photosynthetic rates. They also are looking at how the
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