Discostella stelligera

This planktonic taxon is abundant in oligotrophic lakes during spring and early summer, when the surface mixed layer is shallow. When mixing depth is deeper, abundance declines (Saros et al. 2016). In the latter conditions, larger species, such as Lindavia bodanica, tend to dominate the plankton.

The abundances of D. stelligera can be weighed against abundance of other plankton to create diatom-inferred mixing index to reconstruct past wind conditions in large (>~ 500 ha) lakes or water clarity in smaller lakes (< ~500 ha), which are less susceptible to wind mixing (Fee et al. 1996, Von Einem and Granéli 2021, Saros et al. 2012).

Furthermore, light availability, lake mixing, and timing of nutrient loads favored D. stelligera during years where lake ice cover persisted longer into the year (Malik et al. 2018).

Discostella stelligera is widely reported from lakes in Europe (Krammer and Lange-Bertalot 1991a) and North America, including the Laurentian Great Lakes (Reavie and Kireta 2015), inland lakes in Quebec (Fallu et al. 2000), Wood Buffalo National Park (Moser et al. 2004), New York (Camburn and Charles 2000), Montana (Bahls 2021), oligotrophic to mesotrophic lakes in the Great Lakes Network National Parks (Ramstack et al. 2022, Edlund et al. 2022), and the St. Lawrence River (Reavie and Smol 1998). Environmental optima reported for Discostella stelligera are variable (Saros and Anderson 2015) and include 32 µg/l TP, 9 µg/l Cl (Reavie and Kireta 2015), 15 µg/l TP, and low SiO2 1.3 µg/L(Moser et al. 2004).