For this week's Discussion Board assignment, you need to make a post on the appropriate Discussion Board forum

(organized by type of marine organism) by answering the following questions: On the Web, nd a site that has information about one of these four types of marine microorganisms that can be found in marine sediment: diatoms, radiolarians,

coccolithophores, or foraminifers. Write a 1-paragraph review of the site, including: !

The title of the site and its complete URL Website address (begins with "http://...") (NOTE: you cannot use a site already used by any other student, so it pays to get this done early!) ! ! Include a photo of the organism within your post (you can download a photo from the Web, then upload it into your post in Blackboard using the "Insert/Edit Image" icon on the toolbar but -2 if you use the PAPER CLIP attach icon;"to view an instructional video to see how this is done, click on the "Watch Video" button below) ! ! List at least 2 factoids about the organism (for example, anything that made you say "WOW!") ! ! Any other information about the organism that you found particularly interesting or unusual Please make your post answering all questions posed above by Saturday September 14 !

at noon. Also as part of the assignment, you will need to reply to 2 other students' posts and rate at least 3 other students' posts by Sunday September 15 at noon. Note that
when make a reply to another student, please include their name in your reply: Ex of reply: "Hi John, I appreciate your post because it made me...." This DB assignment is worth 10 points (late posts will be marked down -5 points per day or fraction thereof).

Foraminifers The website that I found informative and interesting in its description of foraminifers is administered by The British Geological Survey and can be accessed at: http://www.bgs.ac.uk/discoveringGeology/time/ Fossilfocus/foraminifera.html According to this site Forminifera are amoeba-like, single-celled protists (very simple micro-organisms).

Foraminifera
Foraminifera (formally called Foraminiferida) are amoeba-like, single-celled protists (very simple micro-organisms). They have been called 'armoured amoebae' because they secrete a tiny shell (test) usually between about a half and one millimetre long. They get their name from the foramen, an opening or tube that interconnects all the chambers of the test. Fossilised tests are found in sediments as old as the earliest Cambrian (about 545 million years ago) and foraminifera can still be found in abundance today, living in marine and brackish waters.

One of the first fossilised foraminifera to have evolved is Platysolenites antiquissimus. It lived about 545 million years ago during the early Cambrian and has been found in rocks in Wales and in a borehole sunk below Oxfordshire. They are agglutinated tubes three or four centimetres long.
Platysolenites antiquissimus.

The photograph (left) shows a cross-section of one of the tubes (which is about two millimetres across) and although it is slightly squashed, the agglutinated sand grains and the tubular structure are clearly visible.
Foraminifera are very small sea organisms that create calcium carbonate (CaCO3) shells to protect themselves. When they make their shells, they incorporate oxygen from the ocean, which contains both 16O and 18O, and as a result, scientists can use foraminifera shells to obtain delta-O-18 values and to determine the ocean temperature at the time of the shell's creation. Using this method, James C. Zachos created a graph of the delta-18-O value over time (1994).

What are Foraminifera?

Foraminifera (hole bearers) or forams for short, are a large phylum of amoeboid protozoans (single celled) with reticulating pseudopods, fine strands of cytoplasm that branch and merge to form a dynamic net. They usually produce a test (or shell) which can have one or more chambers, and are made of calcium carbonate (CaCO3) or mineral grains or other particles glued together. The tests are usually less than 0.5 mm in size, but the largest can be up to 20 cm across. Foraminifera are among the most abundant and scientifically important groups of marine organisms. The tests of recently dead planktic foraminifera are so abundant that they form a thick blanket over one third of the surface of the Earth (as Globigerina ooze on the ocean floor). Foraminifera are essentially marine- and estuarine-dwelling protozoans living in all environments from the greatest depths right up to highest astronomical tide level and from the equator to the poles. The importance of foraminifera comes from the use of their fossil tests in biostratigraphy, paleoenvironmental studies, and isotope geochemistry. Their ubiquity in most marine sedimentary rocks, often as large, wellpreserved, diverse assemblages, has resulted in their being the most studied group of fossils worldwide. Because modern foraminifera have attracted little interest from biologists, paleontologists have been forced to undertake most studies, including genetic research, on the living fauna.