Drs. Charles O'Kelly and Robert Andersen of Maine's Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences have been given an award to study the biodiversity and evolution of an important group of microscopic green algae. It is a challenge to identify small living things, and it is a challenge to obtain accurate information that will allow researchers to identify them when necessary. Research by O'Kelly and Andersen will make identification less of a challenge for one family of small green algae, the Ulvellaceae. Members of the Ulvellaceae are common in marine and freshwater environments, but because they are small, they typically go unnoticed - except for those species that cause disease in commercially-valuable seaweeds and in corals. Many species have been described, but the characters separating them are few and hard to use. Descriptions, records, and research reports are widely scattered, hard to acquire and assemble, and frequently are contradictory. Also, species that look very much alike may not be closely related. The historical relationships among species of Ulvellaceae, and species that look like they belong to Ulvellaceae but do not, are not well known and, when discovered, may surprise. For example, the nearest relatives of Ulvellaceae are not small algae, but large ones (the sea lettuces, family Ulvaceae). They will assemble the widely-scattered reports on algae in the Ulvellaceae, and will collect living and preserved specimens of them, particularly from the temperate eastern and western coasts of North America. The research team will interpret these materials using modern culture, microscopical, and molecular methods, and produce more accurate species concepts and reconstructions of historical relationships. They expect to find and describe a number of new species. Results of this work will be posted online, at an authoritative, "one stop" shopping site for information on this group of algae. The study will provide a workable template for other efforts to assemble and distribute information on the diversity of Earth's small creatures.
