What the heck is a lek?
Males great bustards perform spectacular courtship displays, gathering at a ‘lek’ or small display ground to try to impress the females.
Menu
This sample was collected on the shoreline zone between low and high tide from Studland, southeast Dorset, in 1977. A green smudge on paper marks the remains of this unassuming algae. In fact, if you’ve come across it in nature, you may have ignored it until you found yourself slipping across it on beach stones.
Although algae are plant like in many ways – for example producing their own food using the sun’s energy, carbon dioxide and water – algae are not classified as belonging to the plant kingdom. They are from a kingdom of organisms called protists that are far older than plants (algae first evolved over a billion years ago), and plants evolved from algae.
This type of alga grows in long, fine green filaments. Under water, the filaments spread apart and fill their watery space beautifully, to receive as much sunlight as possible; out of water they clump together forming vast green flattened mats.
Rhizo means root, suggesting the alga’s appearance; and riparium relates to the fact that this alga can grow in freshwater such as rivers, as well as the sea. It is a widespread alga, growing around all the Earth’s continents.
Algae can be extremely effective at removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In fact, much of the fossil fuel oil that we’ve burnt realising carbon dioxide would have originated as marine algae.
Before algae colonised our planet, thick extensive mats of bacteria covered shorelines and photosynthesised. These released so much oxygen into the sea, then the atmosphere, that life was able to breath, evolve, flourish, and diversify into the life forms we have today. Such seemingly insignificant organisms remind us how all life and environments are connected and interdependent. Thank you, unassuming slippery green mats.
This object was highlighted by Sophia, art student and gallery steward for Dorset Museum & Art Gallery.
“When I was a child, I would go down to a broad sandy beach in North Cornwall – very early in the morning – to surf with my grandad. The thrill of catching a wave and the peace of being with it as I travelled with the water, grounded me, making me feel connected and alive. After, I’d spend hours in the rock pool watching the different seaweeds move so effortlessly with the currents; the long, fine strands mesmerized me, so content just to be, without resistance or concern.
For me, the sound and motion of water is symbolic of life itself, it’s like the pulse of the world – fluid, changeable, constant. Algae exist in the state, they move with it. Taking the time to just be in that same floating state helped put things in perspective when I felt stressed or anxious and made me feel peaceful and content. It helps me understand that, like algae, our primary function is to be.
There is an honesty to it which reminds me of us and our place in this world – that we’re a part of it, and even if we see our function within it, it moves us as much as we move within it.
Now when I see these algae – in ponds, or rivers, or back on the same beach in those rock pools – I feel that same comfort and connection.”
Males great bustards perform spectacular courtship displays, gathering at a ‘lek’ or small display ground to try to impress the females.
The great bustard has a dignified slow walk but tends to run when disturbed, rather than fly.
The hen-bird on display at The Salisbury Museum was one of the last great bustards to be eaten in the town!