Museum of Microalgae, 2024

Neil, Sylvia, and Elliot (Strathclyde Uni) brought a table of diatoms to a pop-up Museum of Microalgae in the Glasgow Botanic Gardens, along with algal evangelist Eric Bear and a crew from the SAMS Culture Collection of Algae and Protozoa in Oban. Amazing turnout for a rainy Friday in November, and there were algae-based energy … Read more

Mapping Ocean Change at Cove Park (2022)

The Mapping Ocean Change Through Art project kicked off a season of public workshops around Scotland with a day at Cove Park where we combed the beach, filtered plankton out of the sea, and folded a Scottish coastal food chain from phytoplankton to gannets. Diagrams for many of these are available elsewhere on this site.

Sandeel

Along the North Sea coast of Britain they have been getting smaller as the zooplankton that they eat decline, and the effects are being felt through the entire food web. Not plankton, but fond of plankton! Sandeels, known as sand lances in North America (family Ammodytidae), are slender, silvery fish that are a crucial food … Read more

At the Hunterian Museum, 2021–22

As part of a COP26 Science Showcase called “Changing Climate, Changing Stories” at University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum, Neil folded the zooplankton typically eaten by a sandeel off the coast of Scotland at 50x magnification. The small copepods (representing Oithona, Acartia, Centropages spp.) are variants on the model diagrammed by Dasa Severova here. The large … Read more