If you raise the temperature and keep it constant at about, say, 40° C, which is getting a little warm there, you end up with almost a pure culture of caladium. Here's Cyanidium. I always like to point out, this is not a culture from the lab. This is a field sample. So this is what I mean when I say that out there in nature you have almost a pure culture in that PH and temperature. Cyanidium can grow at quite a temperature range in the lab but I believe that what happens is out in nature when you're away from about 40° in that low pH, that other organisms out compete it. But at that pH and temperature, Cyanidium has the competitive advantage and it outcompetes the other organisms.

Here it is. It's a green alga that's a thick mat and looks purple and you have a red algae here that's that looks green. One thing about going to work in Yellowstone on algae is things are never the color you expect them to be. Here again it's extremely shallow and it's a great place to work. One of the nice things about the mat, or to me one of the nicest things, is over the last few years, I have more and more used it as a model system, almost a laboratory culture that is also a natural community. What I mean here is that when I do results that are really heavily molecular biology, someone comes back to me and says, well you didn't control for temperature, you didn't control for pH. And I say, it's all taken care of for me. You've got a basically pure culture of cells, constant pH, constant temperature, constant water conditions. I don't have to change the cultures once a week in the lab. And yet we have a natural ecosystem that's responding to the natural variations and radiation for the course of the day. So it turned out to be an extremely nice model system.

By the way, for those of you who have been to Yellowstone, both these sites are very close to the North region. The former was in North Annex. This is about two or three miles north of North Annex, in the creek area.

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