ABSTRACT
The stunning impact that new methods are having on aquatic microbial ecology points out that the field is still methods limited. Aquatic microbial ecology is that the usual methods of laboratory microbiology do not work for most aquatic microbes and for measuring most of the rates occurring in nature. The microbes from natural waters exist under extremely low concentrations of nutrients and do not grow well on laboratory media. Accordingly, microbial ecology has to ultimately deal with the organisms in their natural surroundings or habitats and this is the part of microbial ecology that is least understood. The advent of the International Biological Program in the early 1970s forced ecologists for almost the first time to account for all of the carbon cycling in soil and freshwater. Knowledge about the ecology of the microbes came mostly from the performance of cultures on various growth media or in continuous culture.
