Описание:The course is meant to foreign students taking a short course of hydrobiology during their winter practice in Moscow. The goal is to explain what happens beneath the ice of the Moscow River and of a pond at the Zvenigirod Biological Station. The course consists of two parts:
I. Excursion to the Moscow River and to the pond.
Demonstration of hydrobiological tools – plankton net and bathometer – and carrying out plankton sampling.
Lecturing about specific winter conditions: short day length, both total solar radiation and photosynthetical available radiation; lack of wind-induced mixing, which causes an inverse vertical temperature gradient; turnover resulting from the paradoxical properties of water; oxygen conditions; nutrient conditions; dependence of zooplankton dynamics on composition and biomass of organisms in autumn and on ice conditions; cryophilic, eurythermal and fugitive species in zooplankton.
II. Laboratory Work.
Examining the probes under the microscope. Showing equipment – Bogorov’s chamber and a piston pipet. Teaching the main methods – concentration and dilution of zooplankton samples. Demonstrating the main planktonic groups – Cladocera, Rorifera and Protozoa and identification of the typical representatives of the groups, using an on-line identificator in English and some translated keys from a Russian manual.