You

by DOM editors |

November’s Diatom of the Month is you. Aka Diatoma readerii (Fig. 1).

Figure 1. Diatoma readerii. In reality, blogger and co-editor Nick Schulte dressed as the diatom he wishes he could be (Chamaepinnularia cymatopleura). Note the white scale bar and plate-like, golden chloroplasts.

This month we, the editorial board of DOM, want to ask you, the reader, for feedback on our blog series. This will serve both as a census of our readers and as a guide for us to make changes to the blog to best suit our current readers and grow our authorship and readership. We are asking visitors from the website, Facebook, Twitter, and DIATOM-L to fill out a short survey (below) to get a sense of who you are, what you like and don’t like about the blog series, and what you can do for DOM with us in the future.

Survey responses will be accepted until December 15 (but don’t wait!). Then we’ll compile the responses and let you know the takeaways in the December DOM, in addition to some end-of-year reflections. In January we will return to our regularly scheduled programming of detailed looks at diatoms and diatom research.

To complete the survey (estimated time: 3 minutes), please follow the link below. All responses are anonymous and optional. Please share the link with as many readers as possible.

Survey link: https://forms.gle/MzQ12uPHFSsHCniC9 [closed]

And since it’s No Shave November (or December if you like), we figured we would showcase some of the most stylish diatoms out there (Fig. 2).

Figure 2. Selected mustache-shaped diatoms. From a T-shirt designed by students of the 2014 Ecology and Systematics of Diatoms class at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory.