Abstract

The current work was involved in the distributional analysis of the cyanobacteria strains present in the predominant water outlets present in the city, for analysing the types of strains found during the different seasonal interims. The cyanobacteria distribution in water from two different stations of Southern India were analysed at four months interval during the period of July 2002 to June 2004. The cyanobacteria population in the vicinity was analyzed using the physico-chemical factors like pH, temperature, electrical conductivity, carbonate, bicarbonate, chloride, calcium, magnesium, total phosphorus, inorganic phosphorus, sulphate, sulphite, ammoniacal nitrogen, nitrate, nitrite, silicate, iron, zinc, copper and manganese and algal flora (qualitative) were also studied and compared their variations among the three different freshwater bodies. In addition, biological parameters such as primary production gross primary productivity, net primary productivity and community respiration rate were also studied. Totally 64 taxa of cyanobacteria belonging to 7 families were isolated. The members of the families Oscillatoriaceae and Chroococcaceae were found to be predominant in all the three sampling sites. It was observed that the distributional patterns of the cyanobacteria were related with that of the physico-chemical parameters of the water sample. Since there was no significant difference in the parameters of the sampling sites, a few cyanobacterial strains were found to be dominating, followed by co-dominating and peripheral species which were found to be common in all the sampling sites. This ultimately shows that there is no significant changes in the distribution of the cyanobacterial strains in the current area of study under the same equatorial region.

Key words: Cyanobacterial population, physico-chemical properties, cyanobacterial distribution, algal distribution, chroococcaceae, oscillatoriaceae.