Abstract
The occurrence of magnetic bacteria in several lakes and ponds of the Alpine foreland of Southern Germany has been studied. The habitat of the bacteria comprises the uppermost 2 cm of the sediment, with a maximum population density of 107/ml occurring at a depth of two to five millimetres below the water/sediment interface. A variety of different forms of magnetic bacteria was found, spirilli, cocci, vibrios and rod-shaped bacteria.
Most of the magnetic bacteria are highly mobile. It is therefore very difficult to study one and the same bacterium over a significant length of time under the optical microscope. To overcome this difficulty we developed a special configuration of rotating magnetic fields that keeps a certain bacterium within the field of view. This arrangement provides a convenient method to measure the swimming speed of an individual bacterium and also to determine its magnetic moment.
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© 1989 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Petersen, N., Weiss, D.G., Vali, H. (1989). Magnetic Bacteria in Lake Sediments. In: Lowes, F.J., Collinson, D.W., Parry, J.H., Runcorn, S.K., Tozer, D.C., Soward, A. (eds) Geomagnetism and Palaeomagnetism. NATO ASI Series, vol 261. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0905-2_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-0905-2_17
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