The number of cells in colonies of the cyanobacterium Microcystis aeruginosa satisfies Benford's law

Nowadays, numerous power- or scaling-laws are encountered in many fields of biology: an example is Benford's law. According to this law, the first significant digit of any given series of numbers is figure I more often than figure 2, which in turn appears more often than 3, and so on. Here we show that number of cells per colony in the cyanobacterium Microcystis aeruginosa (F.T. Kutzing) F.T. Kutzing, randomly isolated from different reservoirs and lakes from Andalusia (S Spain), was very variable (with figures differing up to five orders of magnitude). However, the distribution of the number of cells per colony satisfies Benford's law. This situation could be much more general in colonial cyanobacteria. Crown Copyright (C) 2008 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.