Session 6
Phytoplankton Lifestyles
Papers to Read Before!
Burson 2018: using a natural phytoplankton community to test hypotheses about competition
Seymour 2017: a review of phytoplankton-bacterial relationships
Competition at a Cellular Physiology Level
A recent paper by John Casey in the Follows group illuminates how “simple” modeling approaches can shed light on within-cell competition for transporters in the face of nutrient limitation.
In this segment, we’ll go beyond the nutrient-and-surrounding-strategy level to explore how between-cell competition also drives nutrient consumption in the phytoplankton.
Competition
In Burson et al.’s 2018 paper, we are challenged to once again consider whether competition for light should be considered on a level playing field with competition for nutrients.
The authors explore two ecological theories in concert with performing a series of co-limitation experiments on seawater that they collected personally. In these experiments, they subject a natural phytoplankton community (which is devoid of grazers via filtering and bubbling with CO2) to either low, medium, or high levels of limitation in nitrogen and phosphorus. The result of this limitation is that light will occasionally be more or less limiting based on whether (a) another nutrient is more pressingly limited and (b) whether the phytoplankton community increases to such a density that light limitation will then ensue.