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Staining of subfossil chironomid head capsules: a method for improving the extraction process from lake sediments and peat

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Abstract

Subfossil chironomids are regarded as a useful biological proxy for palaeoenvironmental research, but picking chironomid head capsules from aquatic sediments is extremely time-consuming. This is often the case for finding and isolating small head capsules from the deflocculated sediment. In this study, two stains (aniline blue and cotton blue) were used to dye chironomid head capsules in lake and peat sediments to improve the traditional pretreatment method and boost the picking efficiency. The results suggested that: (1) there were sharp contrasts between chironomids and residues after staining, which could shorten picking time for both lake and peat samples; (2) different parts of head capsules showed distinctive colour in stained samples and thus facilitated identification and taxonomy of subfossil chironomids; (3) the dyeing effects of two stains were comparable and no significant effect of staining on chironomid composition has been observed compared with unstained samples. This study demonstrates that aniline blue and cotton blue stain can promote picking efficiency of subfossil chironomids, and can be widely applied to pretreatment of sedimentary chironomids in palaeoenvironmental studies on lakes and peatlands.

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Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to the editors and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions. This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 41877428; 41402307) and the Fundamental Research Funds for National University, South-Central University for Nationalities (Grant Number: CZZ18007).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Resources and Environmental Science, South-Central University for Nationalities, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Yanmin Cao, Zijie Zheng, Xuan Luo, Zhe Dai & Anqi Zhou

  2. State Key Laboratory of Environment Simulation, School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Zijie Zheng

  3. Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou, 510640, China

    Xuan Luo

  4. School of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Southampton, Southampton, SO171BJ, UK

    Peter G. Langdon

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  1. Yanmin Cao
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  2. Zijie Zheng
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  3. Xuan Luo
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  4. Peter G. Langdon
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  5. Zhe Dai
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  6. Anqi Zhou
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Correspondence to Yanmin Cao.

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Handling editor: Jasmine Saros

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Cao, Y., Zheng, Z., Luo, X. et al. Staining of subfossil chironomid head capsules: a method for improving the extraction process from lake sediments and peat. Hydrobiologia 848, 631–640 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-020-04469-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-020-04469-7

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