Iowa's Protozoa

This volume is available through the Google digitized books program. I did download it, but unfortunately my copy has some issues with the software so it is not complete. This volume was written apparently as a Doctorial thesis. There are 219 carefully drawn figures, and a quick count yielded 172 species. Some were not identified to species level, and may have even been new species at the time. All of the species were from various waters of the state.

The drawing at the right is from that volume--it was converted into a picture file with the white space removed.

There are also a number of studies of the group conducted at the Iowa Lakeside Lab--a list of the publications in the archive is at: http://www.inhf.org/NRIlakeside.htm

It would be interesting to see what someone could do with the group with the modern tools such as digital microscopes that are available now. Fresh waters are of course not the only habitat for protozoans. Many are parasites, many dwell in the soil or other habitats. My guess is that Mr. Edmundson's list could be low by a factor of ten or more from the real number of species. But the accuracy of this guess is about what I could achieve by throwing darts blindfolded.