Cyanobacteria Diversity in Blooms from the Greater Sudbury Area

Abstract

The Greater Sudbury Area is approximately 400 km north of the city of Toronto and falls within a large number of temperate lakes of various sizes. This area has been mined for nickel and other metals for several decades. These activities have affected the watersheds of Northern Ontario and have influenced the chemistry of a number of lakes. Blooms of cyanobacteria occur yearly in several lakes, mainly in the early and late summer months. Much of the chemistry of these lakes is known but the nature of the cyanobacterial blooms and the factors that may contribute to their sudden appearance are not. We sampled blooms from five Greater Sudbury Area lakes and identified the species present by morphological and molecular methods. The dominant genera present as characterized by morphological examination were Synechocystis, Leptolyngbya, Anabaena, Cylindrospermum, Nostoc, Borzia, Phormidium, Pseudoanabaena, Oscillatoria, and Planktothrix. Three of these isolates, Leptolyngbya, Anabaena, and Planktothrix were confirmed by partial rRNA sequence analysis.