Talk:Algae

What is the average size of algae?

(No text posted other than the header)

That's not a meaningful question, since some are unicellular and some are many meters long. It's like asking what the average size of an animal is. The average size of animals is probably less than a centimeter, considering that most animals are insects, especially beetles and ants. Animals vary from the microscopic to the huge, and so do algae. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:50, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Size of Kelp

70m or even 50m seems a bit long to me - will have to look into this! Osborne 15:02, 2 February 2007 (UTC) "...grow as fast as half a metre a day to tower 30 - 50 m (98 - 164 ft) above the seabed." - Ref Thomas, "Seaweeds." 2002. Seems correct! Osborne

References//External links

It seems to me these two are in the one list - I think they should not be. If I am correct will someone please correct it - I am not experienced enough & would do more harm than good.Osborne 09:12, 13 February 2007 (UTC)

Examples

Should "Examples" be kept. One day there could be a very long list - too long. Any ideas? Osborne 09:16, 13 February 2007 (UTC) A full list of Examples would be too long - I will consider a "truncated" list: a few greens, a few browns and a few reds. Does anyone agree/disagree? Osborne 11:38, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Fitzpatrick

Noted near the top. Who is "Fitzpatrick"? Is there any point in keeping the name here. ? or indeed what is the "*" for? Osborne 09:22, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

I have deleted"* Fitzpatrick ...and the ref to the external website, replaced it as is the way in Wikipedia - I think. Hope this is OK Osborne 09:37, 15 February 2007 (UTC)

Classification

It is stated in this section that “the term "algae" refers to any aquatic organisms capable of photosynthesis”. This comment is accurately referenced to UCMP, but is it correct? I'm no phycologist, but seagrasses are clearly “aquatic organisms capable of photosynthesis”, yet are angiosperms. As, indeed, are water-lilies and their ilk. Or am I missing a trick here? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Lacrymalis (talk • contribs) 21:44, 26 February 2007 (UTC).Lacrymalis 21:45, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Forms of algae

"In three &mdash lines even higher levels of organization have been reached, leading to organisms with full tissue differentiation. ..." What does this "&mdash" mean!!!Osborne 15:30, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

It's a SGML entity whose complete syntax is "—" and which therefore translates to "—". However the sentence is difficult to read even without that extra em dash. --saimhe 16:58, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Distribution

The "distruibution" as shown gives no text and as such is not good, however possibly someone will write it up! I might, if I find the time. These are just a few refs perhaps worth keeping note of. Osborne 13:17, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

I have further refs - however refs do not make an article - they need to be drawn together somehow! Any advice? (before 4th July) Osborne 13:44, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

Poop?

The first section in this article is "Poop". Looks like vandalism..

P97

Someone has entered some words of rubbish. Presumed vandalism. Vandal not identified: "71 75 128 149 at 21.03 on the 7th." I am not confident to correct this.Osborne 08:14, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Should be fixed, now. Thanks for bringing that up! If you're curious, you can find more information at WP:REVERT. – Luna Santin (talk) 08:19, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Reference 4

Reference 4 does contain the figures of the statement 'It is estimated that algae produce about 73 to 87 percent of the net global production of oxygen'. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.31.82.245 (talk) 09:50, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

ADVICE

This article copied from TIME magazine - is it permitted? See "ALGAE" http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1616252,00.html —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Osborne (talk • contribs) 11:11, 8 May 2007 (UTC).

Algae (programming language)

Is this - see title- a separate article from Algae it is confusing the articles. I will check again.Osborne 20:30, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, they are separate. This article is about the plant algae, and the article you mentioned is about a programming language. We already have a disambiguation link at the top of the page, so I'm not sure what else you want us to do. Hersfold ^(t/a/c) 20:57, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Cyanobacteria as 'Plants' or 'Protists' or 'Algae'

Someone is using very out of date sources, since Cyanobacteria are no longer considered protists, nor certainly plants, and they are no longer called Cyanophyta since this seems to suggest that they are plants. According to Introduction to Botany by Murray W. Nabors (2004), page 386, the algal phyla are Euglenophyta, Dinophyta, Baccillariophyta, Xanthophyta, Chrysophyta, Cryptophyta, Prymnesiophyta, Phaeophyta, Rhodophyta, and Chlorophyta. This source recognizes the close relation between the plants and Chlorophyta, and Biology 8th ed. (Raven, McGraw-Hill, 2007) places Chlorophyta in the Viridiplantae. However, the cyanobacteria are excluded from the algae in the first source and placed specifically in the bacteria, and the second source also calls them bacteria.

The "algae" are of course an artificial group, but I think every effort should be made to communicate that Cyanobacteria don't simply have "bacterial characteristics" as will be found in decades old sources, but are certainly bacteria. Also, the name Cyanophyta should be avoided. Finally, many modern sources define algae as eukaryotic, so I think the blue-green algae material may need to be moved to cyanobacteria. --♦♦♦Vlmastra♦♦♦ (talk) 19:04, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I noticed this problem yesterday. This is one very important article for WP:PLANTS and it has not gotten the attention it deserves. Please, if you have good resources (you certainly have knowledge) and time, then be BOLD and begin updating and improving the article. Since "blue-green algae" is still common in textbooks, some information should remain here, but prehaps not so prominently at the outset of the article. --EncycloPetey (talk) 19:06, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I'm working on the introduction, but I'm struggling with the formatting. I some how managed to make a couple of paragraphs disappear! Any help is welcome. --♦♦♦Vlmastra♦♦♦ (talk) 19:39, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

This material is better placed in Cyanobacteria:

Cyanobacteria are some of the oldest organisms to appear in the fossil record dating back to the Precambrian, possibly as far as about 3.5 billion years. Ancient cyanobacteria likely produced much of the oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere.

Cyanobacteria can be unicellular, colonial, or filamentous. They have a prokaryotic cell structure typical of bacteria and conduct photosynthesis on specialized cytoplasmic membranes called thylakoid membranes, rather than in organelles. Some filamentous blue-green algae have specialized cells, termed heterocysts, in which nitrogen fixation occurs. The perfect prokaryotic cell consist of miscalgnous sheath covering cell wall that consist of pectinic substance and saccharide while the cell wall consist of 4 layers, an outer and inner layer and a middle layer while the fourth layer is attached to plasma membrane and the protoplast consist of a 2 part peripheral coloured part known as chromatoplasm which contain the pigments in case of algae and contain photothynsis product e.g. in cyanobacteria it contains chlorophylla, b-carotein and c-phycocyanin and c-phycoerthyrin.

--♦♦♦Vlmastra♦♦♦ (talk) 03:32, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Bot report : Found duplicate references !

In the last revision I edited, I found duplicate named references, i.e. references sharing the same name, but not having the same content. Please check them, as I am not able to fix them automatically :)

• "IntroBot" :
  • Nabors, Murray W., 2004. Introduction to Botany. Pearson Education, Inc., San Francisco, CA.
  • <ref name="Round 81">'''Round, F.E.''' 1981. ''The Ecology of Algae.'' Cambridge University Press, London. ISBN 0 521 22583 3
• "Mondragon 03" :
  • Mondragon, J. and Mondragon, J. 2003. Seaweeds of the Pacific Coast. Sea Challengers Publications, Monterey, California. ISBN 0-930118-29-4
  • Mondragon, J. and Mondragon, J. 2003. Seaweeds of the Pacific Coast. Sea Challengers Publications, Monterey. ISBN 0-930118-29-4
• "Huisman 00" :
  • Huisman, J.M. 2000. Marine Plants of Australia. University of Western Australian Press, Australian Biological Resources Study. ISBN 1 876268 33 6
  • Huisman, J.M. 2000. Marine Plants of Australia. University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, Western Australia. ISBN 1 876268 33 6

NicDumZ ~ 13:14, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanks; fixed. Kingdon (talk) 14:09, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Orthography

Should have a redirect for algæ. —DIV (128.250.80.15 (talk) 02:35, 12 September 2008 (UTC))

Why? Modern English does not use the æ, and most people don't have a key for that character on their keyboards. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:18, 13 September 2008 (UTC)

Vulgar edits

Luckee1234 ---Please do not enter vulgar notes, there is no point.Osborne 19:06, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

See Lukee1234 (talk · contribs). I've left a note at the talk page, but if there are a few more vandalism edits, and nothing constructive, the account will likely be disabled (see for example WP:AIV or WP:Vandalism). Kingdon (talk) 01:41, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Algae are prokaryotes not eukaryotes.

what the headlines say. also, some articles include some algae as plants but not all. someone should research this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.177.137.162 (talk) 23:13, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

What headlines? Where? Most algal cells contain nuclei, and any introductory botany textbook will attest to this. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:42, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

The .. alga, the ... alga

One alga, an alga, the alga, refer to an individual specimen: you pick it up and say, "look, here is an alga." If you should gather one alga after another and have a collection of them, you would say, "look, I have some algae", or "look at the algae" or "I have algae in my collection." If now you abstract from all the possible algae you might collect and conceive a class of objects, you would express your concept with the name of the class, Algae, which in philosphy partakes of the unity problem or the problem of the one and the many: it is many algae and yet shares such a unity that it is one Algae. One Algae, an Algae, the Algae, refer to any subclass of this class, which has the same problem, it is one Algae being many algae. What you can never do, and sounds very strange if you try it, is to call the Red Algae an alga, or refer to the ingestion of an alga. What, only one alga? In all the evolution of the cell, only one alga was ingested? The reason you are reading such an explanation is that you have encountered what in traditional philosophy is called the unity problem, which can take the form of the one and the many as you have just seen (or should have seen) or the parts and the whole. Just when did the symbiont lose its independently existing status as a whole and become a part of something else? Is a part or is it not a whole of its own? It seems we have parts that are wholes and wholes that though united as one and the same are not the same. Ciao, and don't try to solve it in this article, and stop refering to a class as an alga.Dave (talk) 20:49, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Well for goodness sake, I have made a mistake here. I still can't believe it. I'm reeling from the shock. This is the first one, I think. I realized it in reading the article on lichens, which has a request for a clean-up. I may actually have to go there. The use of a singular of a class to mean one subclass of the class is allowed and is natural to the language. For example, one plant is not only an individual plant but is one species of the plants (even though said species has many individuals). Similarly, a moss is a species of the mosses, a lichen is a species of the lichens and an alga is a species (or higher) of the Algae. So, I am going to make sure none of my efforts to clean up this article introduced any more errors along those lines and allow the term where appropriate here and elsewhere. We are not out of the woods on this however. There are some instances of the inappropriate choice of alga (or lichen). The wrong word here can result in a very confusing sentence or two. One never encounters alga in ordinary English but as I look through the botanical Internet I see many persons struggling with the choice of words. This is the old technical writing problem. If you leave the writing up to the specialist he often cannot make himself understood in ordinary English but if you use an English writer he typically can't get the details right without serious coaching. So I may add a word or phrase here and there to try to make the thing clearer to the non-botanist, and if you look at the lichens article you will see that is exactly what it needs (but more extensively).

While I am on the subject of total confusion let me ask you not to use botanical abbreviations of literature in your biblio items. While such things if done rightly in botanical literature are a concise tool for botanists they are a language from Mars here and most Wikipedia editors are only copying someone else's citations and moreover doing it wrongly. A wrong abbreviation is gobbledeygook. Please. We don't use APA, Harvard (not any more), Turabian or what not, we use Wikipedia, which is specified by cite book, Citation, cite journal, etc., which can be used to approximate those others but is not identical to them. We need full names of authors or editors if available with links to any Wikipedia articles on them and titles along with page numbers. Furthermore, if possible try to select works that are actually accessible somewhere and not totally rare and expensive.Dave (talk) 14:23, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Last half of article

I've been working on this thing and the first half seem to be coming together pretty good thanks to the previous efforts of someone obviously trained in this field. The last half isn't so good, so beware. From distribution on down the thing is contradictory and suspect and makes all sorts of unwarranted generalizations and assumptions. Also the the exposure scale does not belong in this article at all, it belongs under Ballantine Scale and the intent of the scale here is obscure. Algae are only incidental. But I do not feel I can go on to correct it until I get a passable article here. Also a lot of those "refs" can be combined - we don't need a separate entry for each volume. I will be on this a bit further until it seems organized and readable and as concise as I can reasonably make it.Dave (talk) 11:46, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Didn't have a chance to review all your changes over the last week or so, but on the whole, it looks good. I don't really understand this edit - is there some text which would be unclear without the two paragraph discussion of philosophy? Is there some way to stick closer to the facts? As for some of the others, thanks for cleaning up those references and external links. And I agree about moving the material to Ballantine Scale which you did. Kingdon (talk) 15:07, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

This section about relationship to other plants reads like an overly-hedged philosophical essay. I would like to see it removed now, be rewritten, then reinserted if necessary.

This sentence, isn't readable, cannot be comprehended, and if it says what I think it is trying to say, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia, especially in the Algae article:

Regardless of how evolution may be currently philosophically viewed or may have been viewed in the past (see under history of evolutionary thought) and regardless of whether the scientist is scientifically justified in expecting that any largest-scale trends in evolution exist or have existed, from an empirical point of view the combined evidence from phylogenetics and the study of fossils demonstrate that in the geologic time scale the chronological succession of periods is noteworthy for a partial succession, especially in the earlier periods, from chemically less complex to chemically more complex forms deriving from the less complex.

--KP Botany (talk) 18:53, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

OK, I've removed it. If there is a desire to put something back, I'd like to hear more about what problems this text was trying to address. I too found it hard to understand. Kingdon (talk) 03:21, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Ok, that is what I get for not finishing it right away. What I am trying to say is, where do the Algae stand in relation to the higher plants? Why, they are intermediary between the Procaryotes and higher plants. They are steps on the way to the evolution of the plants. I was going to launch from there into the fossil evidence but I got off onto some of the more needy aspects of the article. The reason I got into this is, somebody might jump up and say, no, there are no steps and the Algae are not steps on the way to anything. There is no evolutionary progress and certainly none toward any "higher" plants. I was led to think this by encountering the linked articles. So, I was trying to head that off. I personally think those points of view are certainly answered by the fossil evidence. I'm not especially attached to the philosophic approach and if it were not for the cynical articles on Wikipedia - probably promulgated by anti-evolutionists - I never would have got into it. As this is to a large degree a cooperative effort, if you don't see a need to get philosophic, then let's wait and see if the issue comes up. Or, if you see what I mean and would like to give a try, go right ahead. I thought the material there before was too scanty and not on target to the heading as it was. It only makes sense to talk about the start of the plants if we are synchronizing it with the start of the Algae. I like the way the first half of the article is written and presume that the author(s) know something about it. I would like to see that style and level of content extended into that section so that we can know when the Algae started, from where, how some of them became plants. I can't see how the position is not "intermediate" at least for the line leading to the plants, can you? I'm still trying to fix the article from the bottom. I would like to see something in that relation to higher plants section when I get there. I'm glad you are taking an interest as the Algae are at least as numerous as the plants and this article ought to be on a par with the plants article (of course I haven't looked closely at it but from here it looks good). I got into this through the shorelines. How long is a coast? Hah! So it will be back to Ballantine scale for me, then to shorelines. Meanwhile you fellows ought to note that all the spin-off articles from this are often highly repetitive - someone copied the same writing over and over - argh.Dave (talk) 04:09, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

It's not really a question you have to write an essay to address, though, as this is just supposed to be an encyclopedia article. Just do searches on the issue, find out what reputable authors have to say, get enough information from enough resources to understand the issue, then go for it. I'm interested in the evolutionary history of the "algae," also. --KP Botany (talk) 04:51, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

The encyclopedia is not the discussion so whatever essay I have written above does not have any impact on the length of the article. Is it an essay? I don't know. Am I long-winded? Maybe, maybe not. Is the issue important? Well, yes, I think so. We are tossing the ball back and forth. I invited you to do it, now you invite me to do it. That's all right. I don't mind, when I get to it. I doubt I will say more than a few paras. Much of the info is in the sources given anyway. If there is source material of fossil taxa I may add a section in the box listing fossil groups. I prefer concise writing myself but I hate not to be understood for lack of words. People do assume you know - I know I do. First I want to condense that awful bibiography if I can. What is this, the library of congress?Dave (talk) 16:41, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't think I'd say "intermediary between the Procaryotes and higher plants". You could make that argument for one particular line of green algae but the vast majority of heterokont algae, for example, branched off from the lineage that led to the higher plants a very long time ago. Sounds like we are content to not tackle this section right now, although the raw material for a wider discussion of the evolutionary history is largely there in the "Classification" section and in some other articles . As for the bibiography, one solution would be to just dump it in a "further reading" section and not worry too much. But I agree that wikipedia isn't particularly well-suited to this kind of content, and wouldn't really object to deleting the whole thing either (with the exception of anything used as a reference, if we can ascertain that). Adding information on fossils would be great; that's quite lacking in both plant and algae articles, for the most part. Kingdon (talk) 17:02, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

This is Dave on a different system. Maybe you're right. Maybe it needs a more knowlegeable hand. You seem to be suggesting fossils be a distinct section. Perhaps so, after all, very few fossil species if any can actually be tied to a phylogenetic line. It is all guess-work. Why don't we put off the plants relationship to last. All I would do at this point is check the two refs and maybe put a little more of that in there. But, I do feel on shaky ground. For the biblio many of the books not used as refs can be combined into a series spec. I have to look at the tags. One more thing. I like the Plantae box picture arrangement. It represents the Plantae much better than one shot. I was thinking of doing that for Algae. The current pic appears in Red Algae as well. I originally only wanted to see a "clean" article here but it is taking quite a lot to clean it up. Can't be helped - there has been an algal bloom of articles here. Dave. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.4.27.248 (talk) 17:29, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Cladogram

I haven't said anything yet as I've been mulling it over, but the cladogram (added yesterday) bugs me. The biggest reason is that I really don't think the research is very conclusive about what is related to what. Perhaps it is slightly more clear if you are talking about plastid phylogeny rather than nuclear phylogeny but sources don't always clearly separate the two (perhaps because organisms don't clearly separate them, with genes moving from plastids to nucleuses). There are more tactical reasons (for example, it is kind of confusing to have a cladogram whose terminology is of plastids when the article mostly uses organism names, and it is slightly strange to show cyanobacteria when the rest of the article makes a point of saying that it is talking about eukaryotes), but the key thing is whether such a diagram is going beyond the available evidence. Given papers like Parfrey et al (2006), Burki et al (2007), and Kim and Graham (2008) (all cited at Chromalveolate), I'd say the relationships between the various groups are far from clear, and some aspects especially so (e.g. just what the glaucophytes are related to - for one thing they haven't been studied as much as the other groups). So, what would people think about just deleting the cladogram and going back to what we had (which describes some of these issues in text, where there is more opportunity for adding weasel-words), or some other solution? Kingdon (talk) 01:24, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Photosynthesis

"Some unicellular species rely entirely on external energy sources and have limited or no photosynthetic apparatus.

All algae have photosynthetic machinery ultimately derived from the Cyanobacteria, and so produce oxygen as a by-product of photosynthesis, unlike other photosynthetic bacteria such as purple and green sulfur bacteria." - a quote from the article. The first sentence says that some algae ay have no Photosynthetic apparatus. The second says all algae ave photosynthetis machenery.!!! One of these is wrong. --Osborne 09:54, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Genetically modified algae

There should perhaps be an article on the topic of genetically modified algae, since these have been cited in studies on how to produce environmentally-friendly biofuels. [1][2][3] ADM (talk) 16:22, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Nutrition section

The section has no mention on toxicity in algae designated for human consumption e.g. from heavy metals around the seas of Japan. Zanze123 (talk) 20:49, 20 March 2010 (UTC)

Use of the term "chloroplast"

I've edited the leading paragraph to replace its previous use of "chloroplast" by the more general "plastid" – some of the statements are incorrect (or perhaps 'less correct') when "chloroplast" is used. There is a general issue about the meaning of this term in current usage. It can mean:

• all photosynthetic plastids as opposed to non-photosynthetic plastids
• photosynthetic plastids except those found in glaucophytes
• photosynthetic plastids found in the Viridiplantae, as per the plastid article: "plastids are named differently: chloroplasts in green algae and plants, rhodoplasts in red algae and cyanelles in the glaucophytes".

The article currently varies in its usage and should, in my view, be made consistent. But which usage should be followed? Peter coxhead (talk) 09:21, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Algae produce most of the oxygen sentence

I have attempted to remove this unsourced section,[4] but my deletion of it and another's deletion of it have now been reverted 3 times in an edit war by User:Alacante45. This topic, algae's contribution to earth's extant and dynamic oxygen budget is somewhat controversial and requires sourcing and development of the sentence. In addition, what many people are discussing when they say this is cyanobacteria, an organism rightly excluded from this topic, as it is a bacterium, and, although called algae in the vernacular, is not even remotely related the eukaryotic organisms known as "algae."

To prevent a continuance of this edit war, I request discussion of the issue here. Thanks. --184.99.172.218 (talk) 16:49, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

I have redone that sentence and deleted the controversial statements,as well as citing a reference.