Pune Knowledge on Tap - Reading Water, Reading Time: Stories Told By Diatoms

What stories are hidden in a drop of water? Can microscopic algae tell us whether a river is healthy, reveal how an environment looked centuries ago, or even provide clues about people who lived in the past?

Meet the diatoms, tiny algae with beautiful glass-like shells that inhabit almost every kind of aquatic environment. In this talk, I will share my journey with these remarkable organisms, a journey that has taken us across India, from mountain lakes and streams to rivers, wetlands and other aquatic habitats, and led to the discovery and description of nearly 100 species new to science. I will also introduce H. P. Gandhi, a pioneering Indian diatomist whose work laid an important foundation for understanding India’s remarkable diatom diversity.

Through a few stories from our research, we will see how diatoms help us understand the changing health of Pune’s rivers, and how those preserved in sediments can take us back in time at places such as Bandhavgarh. We will also explore their unexpected role in archaeology, where diatoms can provide clues about past environments and human activities.

From discovering species across India to reading rivers and reconstructing the past, this talk explores how some of nature’s smallest organisms can tell surprisingly big stories about biodiversity, water, people and time.

About the Speaker: Karthick Balasubramanian Leads the diatom diversity and distribution lab at the Biodiversity and Palaeobiology Group of the Agharkar Research Institute, Pune, India. He is the recipient of the T N Khoshoo Award for describing 106 new combinations of diatoms from India and has erected two new genera of diatoms.