Abundance of Benthic Foraminifera

Rose Bengal adheres to proteins and stains the cytoplasm of the organism (Walton 1952), exhibiting a bright pink color. This method is the most common method to study the living assemblages of foraminifera (Bernhard 2000), which is largely sufcient if the aim is to obtain a general picture of the composition of foraminiferal assemblages. However, this method is not perfectly accurate. In fact, foraminifera may be still stained even weeks or months after their death (Corliss and Emerson 1990) and, consequently, the abundance of the living assemblages may be overestimated. This is evident in hypoxic and/or anoxic sediments. Therefore, staining with Rose Bengal is suitable for broad-scale ecological and distributional surveys, but is less appropriate for accurate and short-term experimental studies (Bernhard et al. 2006).