News

Little is known about how biological systems like the brain or a swarm of fish manage to optimally bring together a multitude of individual pieces of information from different locations. There is a hypothesis according to which the best performance of the brain lies at the border between order and chaos, in the state of so-called criticality. Researchers of the Cluster of Excellence "Science of Intelligence" from Humboldt-Universität (HU), the Technical University of Berlin (TU), and IGB have now been able to demonstrate this hypothesis on a large school of fish.

Justyna Wolinska's team has studied the effect of polystyrene nanoparticles on parasite-host interactions. Two studies show that nanoplastics can change the outcomes of a disease.

Microorganisms help to keep the water of lakes clean. In the process, they also detoxify the nitrogen compound ammonium, which is introduced into water bodies by fertilizers, for example, and is also produced naturally by metabolic processes. An international team led by the German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures (DSMZ) with IGB researchers Hans-Peter Grossart and Danny Ionescu has now shown that this detoxification of ammonium in the depths of European lakes is only sustained by an extremely small number of specific archaebacteria species.

Urbanization goes hand in hand with a considerable sealing of soils. About 20 percent of the newly sealed area is not in urban areas, but in rural areas. However, calculations of nutrient fluxes into water bodies have not taken these new sealings in rural areas into account, because these are often based on land use maps and consider urban areas.

As an international, science-based organisation, GEO AquaWatch is dedicated to the global observation of freshwater and marine systems. Since 2022, the organisation has been having a new node at IGB to drive the calibration and validation of satellite data. 

Routine fishing on 29 November this year was the first large inventory conducted in the middle of the Oder since the man-made environmental disaster that occurred in summer. The result: much fewer fish were caught in total, and species such as the blue bream and the asp, which are important to this ecosystem, were lacking completely. Moreover, water analysis conducted by the researchers shows that the salt concentration is still far too high. There could be a repeat of the disaster when temperatures increase, endangering remaining stocks.

Happy Birthday LakeLab! For a decade now, IGB has been conducting large-scale experiments on the impacts of climate change and other anthropogenic environmental changes on lake ecosystems at the IGB LakeLab in Lake Stechlin. In this brief interim account, we present the projects, scientific findings and new perspectives that have emerged from research conducted in the facility so far. It is a journey through time on the occasion of the first big anniversary.

IGB has provided feedback on the government draft of the National Water Strategy, emphasising, among other things, the relevance of aquatic biodiversity and the large practical implementation deficit in water management.