Life cycle
As part of its life cycle, this species produces a resting stage, a dinoflagellate cyst called '' Lingulodinium machaerophorum'' (synonym '' Hystrichosphaeridium machaerophorum''). This cyst was first described by Deflandre and Cookson in 1955 from the Miocene of Balcombe Bay, Victoria, Australia as: "Shell globular, subsphaerical or ellipsoidal with a rigid membrane, more brittle than deformable, covered with numerous long, stiff, conical, pointed processes resembling the blade of a dagger. Surface of shell granular or punctate." Its stratigraphic range is the Upper Paleocene of eastern USA and Denmark till Recent. Organic-walled dinocyst morphology is shown to be controlled by changes in salinity and temperature in some species, more particularly process length variation (processes are sometimes called spines, but that is incorrect because they are not necessarily pointy). This morphological variation is known for '' Lingulodinium machaerophorum'' from culture experiments, and study of surface sediments. The morphological variation of process lengths can be applied for the reconstruction of salinity. Process length variation of ''Lingulodinium machaerophorum'' has been used to reconstruct Black Sea salinity variation.Toxicity
Luminescence
''Lingulodinium polyedra'' are easily visible under 100x magnification (use the 10x or "scanning" objective on most compound microscopes) and their scintillons luminescence in response to surface tension and acidity. Luminescence is under circadian regulation, peaking at night. Because of this obvious rhythms (and also due to the fact that most its activities, physiological and molecular, are rhythmic) ''L. polyedra'' has been a model organism for studying clocks in single cells.Hastings JW. 2008. The Gonyaulax clock at 50: translational control of circadian expression. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 2007;72:141-4. doi: 10.1101/sqb.2007.72.026References
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