Rare earth elements (REEs) are widely used to increase crop production in China. However, little attention has been paid to their impacts on aquatic ecology. Batch cultivation was used here to study the effects of lanthanum (La) and EDTA on the growth and competition of the cyanobacteriurn Microcystis aeruginosa and the green alga Scenedesmus quadricauda. When EDTA was present at a very low concentration (0.269 mu mol L(-1)), low lanthanum concentrations ( 13.4 mu mol L(-1)) had a great inhibitory effect on the growth of M. aeruginosa but little effect on the growth of S. quadricauda, which co...
