Diatoms of North America
Adil Al-Handal
Taxon Contributor
Professor Dept. of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Gothenburg
I am involved in a rather big project to study the distribution and species composition of diatoms along the west coast of Sweden as well as diatoms in the Canary Islands.
My passion for diatoms began in 1976 when I started my M.Sc. project in the University of Alexandria, Egypt. My project was on the feeding habits of some marine fish. When I opened the stomach of few fishes and examined their content under the microscope, I became fascinated with beautiful frustules of diatoms. This was an enough reason to change the whole project into studying planktonic and benthic diatoms in the Eastern Harbour of Alexandria. My research on diatom taxonomy and ecology continued in the University of Wales, UK, where I earned my Ph. D degree in 1985.
I continued exploring the diatoms over a vast geographic distribution including the Arctic, Antarctica, the Atlantic and Indian oceans, Sweden as well as marine and freshwater of Iraq.