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Galdieria partita
Plate 1 of 2. Fu H-Y, Liu S-L and Chiang Y-R (CC BY-SA 4.0) · via Wikimedia

Galdieria partita

Galdieria partita is a species of extremophilic red algae that lives in acidic hot springs. It is the only unicellular species of red algae known to reproduce sexually. It was discovered in 1894 by Josephine Elizabeth Tilden from Yellowstone National Park in the western United States. Originally described as a species of green algae, Chroococcus varium, its scientific name and taxonomic position were revised several times. In 1959, Mary Belle Allen produced the pure culture which has been distributed as the "Allen strain".

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From the article Galdieria partita on Wikipedia (CC BY-SA), quoted section by section

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Range & habitat

G. partita is an thermoacidophile that survives well in high temperature and high acidic environments. They are present in hot springs of the Yellowstone National Park in US, Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia Far East, and the Tatun Volcanic Group area in Taiwan. The hot springs of the Yellowstone National Park has high acidity with a pH ranging from 2.5 to 3, and a temperature ranging from 28 to 90 °C. The Kamchatka hot springs can have a pH as low as 1.5 and temperatures from 50 to 99 °C.

Wikipedia: “Habitat”

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What it does

Asexual reproduction is achieved by spore (endospore) formation. The mother cell divides internally and the daughter cells are released after rupture of the mother cell wall. The chloroplast divides first and then the nucleus afterwards. The daughter cells are called autospores and divide into cell numbers 2 to 4 to 8.

== References ==

Wikipedia: “Reproduction”

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In human culture

Josephine Elizabeth Tilden, the first woman teacher at the University of Minnesota, investigated algae of the Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming in 1894. Among her collection was a species which she identified as a green alga. In 1898, she named it Protococcus botryoides f. caldarium. Austrian biologists Lothar Geitler and Franz Ruttner revised the identification as a blue-green algae with a name Cyanidium caldarium in 1936. Around the same time Joseph J. Copeland created the genus name as Pluto caldarius. The controversy of priority started, but Cyanidium caldarium became more widely used. Mary Belle Allen, while working at the Marine Station of Stanford University, had developed the method of culturing microbes living at high temperature (thermophiles). In 1952, she developed a specific culture media for thermophilic algae by which she isolated an "unidentified unicellular alga" from the acid waters of the Lemonade Spring, The Geysers, Sonoma County, California. In 1958, while working at the Laboratory of Comparative Physiology and Morphology of the Kaiser Foundation Research Institute in Richmond, California, she compared the thermophilic algae of the Lemonade Spring with those of the Yellowstone National Park. With it she produced the first pure culture of the C. caldarium, as reported in 1959. …

Wikipedia: “History”

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Where it lives

Recorded sightings

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geo-referenced records in GBIF, from museums, herbaria and field observers.

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In the stacks

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Every page naming Galdieria partita in the Biodiversity Heritage Library →

This page is assembled live from iNaturalist, GBIF, Wikipedia, the Source Library and the Internet Archive. It is not yet part of the hand-edited codex. iNaturalist taxon 1473689.