Anima Tirkey* and Histesh Solanki

Department of Botany, Bioinformatics and Climate Change Impacts Management, University School of Sciences, Gujarat University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India

*Corresponding Author: Anima Tirkey, Department of Botany, Bioinformatics and Climate Change Impacts Management, University School of Sciences, Gujarat University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India.

Received: December 01, 2022; Published: December 14, 2022

Abstract

Phytoplankton are free floating, unicellular, photosynthetic micro-organism, which form the base of the marine food web, providing a vital biological function for all marine life. They live in well illuminated water column (euphotic zone) as they require light for performing photosynthesis. Phytoplankton in the marine ecosystem are composed of several taxonomic groups which together determine total production and their interaction at different trophic levels and also the flux of particulate carbon from the euphotic zone. Composition and distribution of phytoplankton vary from coast to coast according to their respective hydro-biological environmental. Present study aims to understand the composition and distribution of phytoplankton communities during onset of winter in coast of India. Total 144 species of phytoplankton were identified using microscope technique during study period. Diatoms presented the greatest diversity with 105 species, followed by Dinoflagellates with 25 species and other algae with 13 species. Diatoms were observed to be dominant phytoplankton group in term of percent contribution throughout the study period, contributing 60-86% of the total phytoplankton population followed by other algae (11-32%) except at station 6 and dinoflagellate (3-16%). Near shore station showed the high cell density compared to the off shore station (Figure 3) value ranging from 9.54 x 10⁴ to 46.90 x 10⁴ cell/l and 76. 60 x 10³ to 95.10 x 10³ cells/l respectively, which could be probably because of fact that the coastal areas are usually high productive.

Keywords: Phytoplankton Composition; Coastal Waters; Winter Monsoon; North-eastern Arabian Sea

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Citation

Citation: Anima Tirkey and Histesh Solanki. “Distribution and Species Composition of Phytoplankton Community in the Coastal Water Off Porbandar - North-Eastern Arabian Sea During Winter Season". Acta Scientific Microbiology 6.1 (2023): 23-31.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2022 Anima Tirkey and Histesh Solanki. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.