Evaluation of three preparation methods for living diatoms at a sandy river– mouth tidal flat: Conventional acid–cleaning, nuclear staining, and sieving

Abstract

Three preparation methods for the identification of diatom flora at a river mouth tidal flat were evaluated in terms of species richness, diversity, and composition using a conventional acid–cleaning method, a nuclear staining method, and a newly introduced sieving method. Twenty–five diatom samples were collected from Fujimae Tidal Flat sediments, Nagoya, Japan, in July 2014. Three methods respectively showed different aspects of the diatom flora. The acid–cleaning method indicated the highest species diversity, but it extracted dead diatoms with living ones indiscriminately. In comparison with the acid–cleaning method, the staining method effectively extracted diatoms with fragile and small–sized cells. The sieving method scraped the sessile diatoms selectively and supplemented the staining method in which sessile diatoms were mostly neglected. A combination of these three methods enables to describe precise diatom flora of a tidal flat.