ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2004
Protist taxonomy: an ecological perspective.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2004. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed.
- Imaging the Entire Sexual Life Cycle of the Budding YeastBio-protocol · 2025Article
- Seasonal Transition in the Dominance of Photoautotrophic and Heterotrophic Protists in the Photic Layer of a Subtropical Marine Ecosystem.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Article
- Planktonic prey size selection reveals an emergent keystone predator effect and niche partitioning.PloS one · 2023Article
- Combining morphology, behaviour and genomics to understand the evolution and ecology of microbial eukaryotes.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Review
- BEMOVI, software for extracting behavior and morphology from videos, illustrated with analyses of microbes.Ecology and evolution · 2015Article
- Developing and Integrating Advanced Movement Features Improves Automated Classification of Ciliate Species.PloS one · 2015Article
- Establishment of microbial eukaryotic enrichment cultures from a chemically stratified antarctic lake and assessment of carbon fixation potential.Journal of visualized experiments : JoVE · 2012Article
- Act together-implications of symbioses in aquatic ciliates.Frontiers in microbiology · 2012Article
- Uncultivated microbial eukaryotic diversity: a method to link ssu rRNA gene sequences with morphology.PloS one · 2011Article
- Environmental barcoding reveals massive dinoflagellate diversity in marine environments.PloS one · 2010Article
- Plant-type trehalose synthetic pathway in cryptosporidium and some other apicomplexans.PloS one · 2010Article
- Some considerations for analyzing biodiversity using integrative metagenomics and gene networks.Biology direct · 2010Article
- DNA evidence for global dispersal and probable endemicity of protozoa.BMC evolutionary biology · 2007Article
- Phenotypically different microalgal morphospecies with identical ribosomal DNA: a case of rapid adaptive evolution?Microbial ecology · 2007Article
- Global molecular phylogeography reveals persistent Arctic circumpolar isolation in a marine planktonic protist.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2007Article
- Molecular systematics and ultrastructural characterization of a forgotten species: Chattonidium setense (Ciliophora, Heterotrichea).Proceedings of the Japan Academy. Series B, Physical and biological sciences · 2006Article
- Molecular comparisons of freshwater and marine isolates of the same morphospecies of heterotrophic flagellates.Applied and environmental microbiology · 2006Article
- The extent of protist diversity: insights from molecular ecology of freshwater eukaryotes.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2005Article
- Monitoring change in the abundance and distribution of insects using butterflies and other indicator groups.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2005Article
- Introduction. Taxonomy for the twenty-first century.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2004Article
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Abstract
This is an exploration of contemporary protist taxonomy within an ecological perspective. As it currently stands, the 'morphospecies' does not accommodate the information that might support a truly ecological species concept for the protists. But the 'morphospecies' is merely a first step in erecting a taxonomy of the protists, and it is expected to become more meaningful in the light of genetic, physiological and ecological research in the near future. One possible way forward lies in the recognition that sexual and asexual protists may all be subject to forces of cohesion that result in (DNA) sequence-similarity clusters. A starting point would then be the detection of 'ecotypes'--where genotypic and phenotypic clusters correspond; but for that we need better information regarding the extent of clonality in protists, and better characterization of ecological niches and their boundaries. There is some progress with respect to the latter. Using the example of a community of ciliated protozoa living in the stratified water column of a freshwater pond, it is shown to be possible to gauge the potential of protists to partition their local environment into ecological niches. Around 40 morphospecies can coexist in the superimposed water layers, which presumably represent different ecological niches, but we have yet to discover if these are discrete or continuously variable. It is a myth that taxonomic problems are more severe for protists than for animals and plants. Most of the fundamental problems associated with species concepts (e.g. asexuals, sibling species, phenotypic variation) are distributed across biota in general. The recent history of the status of Pfiesteria provides a model example of an integrated approach to solving what are essentially taxonomic problems.
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