Reading Water, Reading Time

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 live in almost every kind of water. Karthick shares a journey that has taken his group across India, from mountain lakes to rivers and wetlands, and led to the description of nearly 100 species new to science. He also introduces H. P. Gandhi, the pioneering Indian diatomist. Through a few stories from the research, we see how diatoms reveal the changing health of Pune’s rivers, how those preserved in sediments take us back in time at places such as Bandhavgarh, and their unexpected role in archaeology.

Karthick Balasubramanian leads the diatom diversity and distribution lab in the Biodiversity and Palaeobiology Group of the Agharkar Research Institute, Pune. 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.