How many species of algae are there? A reprise. Four kingdoms, 14 phyla, 63 classes and still growing

To date (1 November 2023), the online database AlgaeBase has documented 50,589 species of living algae and 10,556 fossil species here referred to four kingdoms (Eubacteria, Chromista, Plantae, and Protozoa), 14 phyla, and 63 classes. The algae are the third most speciose grouping of plant-like organisms after the flowering plants (≈382,000 species) and fungi (≈170,000 species, including lichens) but are the least well defined of all the botanical groupings. Priority is given to phyla and class names that are familiar to phycologists and that are nomenclaturally valid. The most species-rich phylum is the Heterokontophyta to which 18 classes are referred with 21,052 living species and which is dominated by the diatoms in three classes with 18,673 species (16,427 living; 2239 fossil). The next most species-rich phyla are the red algae (7276 living), the green algae (6851 living), the blue-green algae (Cyanobacteria, 5723 living), the charophytes (4950 living, including the Charophyceae, 511 species living, and the Zygnematophyceae, 4335 living species), Dinoflagellata (2956 living, including the Dinophyceae, 2828 extant), and haptophytes (Haptophyta 1722 species, 517 living).

The history, fungal biodiversity, conservation, and future perspectives for mycology in Egypt

Records of Egyptian fungi, including lichenized fungi, are scattered through a wide array of journals, books, and dissertations, but preliminary annotated checklists and compilations are not all readily available. This review documents the known available sources and compiles data for more than 197 years of Egyptian mycology. Species richness is analysed numerically with respect to the systematic position and ecology. Values of relative species richness of different systematic and ecological groups in Egypt compared to values of the same groups worldwide, show that our knowledge of Egyptian fungi is fragmentary, especially for certain systematic and ecological groups such as Agaricales, Glomeromycota, and lichenized, nematode-trapping, entomopathogenic, marine, aquatic and coprophilous fungi, and also yeasts. Certain groups have never been studied in Egypt, such as Trichomycetes and black yeasts. By screening available sources of information, it was possible to delineate 2281 taxa belonging to 755 genera of fungi, including 57 myxomycete species as known from Egypt. Only 105 taxa new to science have been described from Egypt, one belonging to Chytridiomycota, 47 to Ascomycota, 55 to anamorphic fungi and one to Basidiomycota.

Multiple ancient origins of neoteny in Lycidae(Coleoptera): consequences for ecology and macroevolution

Neoteny, the maintenance of larval features in sexually mature adults, is a radical way of generating evolutionary novelty through shifts in relative timing of developmental programmes. While controlled by the environment in facultative neotenics, retention of larval features is obligatory in many species of Lycidae (net-winged beetles). They are studied here as an example of how developmental shifts and ecology interact to produce macroevolutionary impacts. We conducted a phylogenetic analysis of Lycidae based on DNA sequences from nuclear (18S and 28S rRNA) and mitochondrial (rrnL, cox1, cob and nad5) genes from a representative set of lineages (73 species), including 17 neotenic taxa. Major changes of basal relationships compared with those implied in the current classification generally supported three independent origins of neotenics in Lycidae. The southeast Asian Lyropaeinae and Ateliinae were in basal positions indicating evolutionary antiquity, also confirmed by molecular clock estimates, unlike the neotropical leptolycines nested within Calopterini and presumably much younger. neotenics exhibit typical K-selected traits including slow development, large body size, high investment in offspring and low dispersal. This correlated with low species richness and restricted ranges of neotenic lineages compared with their sisters. Yet, these factors did not impede the evolutionary persistence of affected lineages, even without reversals to fully metamorphosed forms, contradicting earlier suggestions of recent evolution from dispersive non-neotenics.