Algae classification

Algae are plants that usually survive under oceans, seas, ponds and rivers. They vary in size, shape and colour. Agricultural workers use it as fertilizers, some nations eat is as food and scientists use it to comprehend the marine food webs better. However, algae can be very dangerous, especially when it shows up as a red tide, a poisonous algae bloom, that kills many animals.
One of the other problems for many scientists and biologists is that algae is very hard to classify. Some types of algae can look the same, when in reality they are quite different. Algae can be a lot of different colours, as well, including red, brown, yellow and green. Some algae are giant, like the sea kelp, that can grow to over 100 ft in length. Some are tiny, and can only be properly viewed under a microscope (such as the phytoplankton). Also, you can find algae that is unicellular (which means that the whole algae is made up of only one single cell), and multicellular (made up of more then one cell).
Another really strange thing that makes algae extremely difficult to classify is the fact that some species of algae behave like animals, and others like plants. Most algae produce thier own food through a process called photosynthesis, but when algae lives very deep in the ocean, and there is no sunlight available, it can also feed off other organisms, including other algae. Because of all those diffculties, scientists suggest that we should stop calling algae, algae all together, but this name has been around for so long, it is too late to change.
However, scientists have come up with some amazing discoveries that could eventually help them when classifying algae. They believe that one of the first organisms on the planet is a type of bacteria called the cyanobacteria (sometimes known as the blue-green algae). Scientists say that this bacteria could perform photosynthesis, by using sunlight, coarbon dioxide and water. Many other organisms fed on this bacteria all the time. One of those organisms was an ancient ancestor of the green algae. However, when this anicent algae ate the bacteria, the bacteria didn' digest by the algae, it was absorbed by it! That is how the bacteria became a permanent resident inside the algae. So, the genes of the two species of prehistorical organisms mixed up, make up the genes that are essential for the algae the live on our Earth today.
I think that this opic is really interesting, and that scientists will keep on coming up with new discoveries and thoeires to make the precise classificaton of algae possible.


Link: http://www.sciencenewsforkids.org/articles/20100512/Feature1.asp
Author: Barry H. Rosen
Date published: May 12, 2010