Le bleuissement des diatomées et le verdissement des huîtres-revue critique

For more than a century, botanists have been focusing on a microscopic alga, a blue protoplasmic diatom causing the oysters to turn green. In 1669, the Englishman Sprat observed for the first time the relation between the turning green of the sea bottom and that of the oysters. In 1820, Gaillon studied the green matter covering the bottom, including the rocks and the shells, of the oyster ponds with a microscope, and noticed that it was made up of some long mobile organisms, with pointed ends and loaded with green pigment. He named them Vibrio ostrearia. He provided some very good explanations leading to the conclusion that these Vibrio were the cause of the oysters' colour change. A few years later, Bory de Saint-Vincent, classifies them in the genus Navicula.