Environmental control of marine phytoplankton stoichiometry in the North Atlantic Ocean.

The stoichiometric coupling of carbon to limiting nutrients in marine phytoplankton regulates the magnitude of biological carbon sequestration in the ocean. While clear links between plankton C:N ratios and environmental drivers have been identified, the nature and direction of these links, as well as their underlying physiological and ecological controls, remain uncertain. We show, with a well-constrained mechanistic model of plankton ecophysiology, that while nitrogen availability and temperature emerge as the main drivers of phytoplankton C:N stoichiometry in the North Atlantic, the biological mechanisms involved vary depending on the spatiotemporal scale and region considered.

Algal plankton turn to hunting to survive and recover from end-Cretaceous impact darkness.

The end-Cretaceous bolide impact triggered the devastation of marine ecosystems. However, the specific kill mechanism(s) are still debated, and how primary production subsequently recovered remains elusive. We used marine plankton microfossils and eco-evolutionary modeling to determine strategies for survival and recovery, finding that widespread phagotrophy (prey ingestion) was fundamental to plankton surviving the impact and also for the subsequent reestablishment of primary production.

Co-evolution of primitive methane-cycling ecosystems and early Earth's atmosphere and climate.

The history of the Earth has been marked by major ecological transitions, driven by metabolic innovation, that radically reshaped the composition of the oceans and atmosphere. The nature and magnitude of the earliest transitions, hundreds of million years before photosynthesis evolved, remain poorly understood. Using a novel ecosystem-planetary model, we find that pre-photosynthetic methane-cycling microbial ecosystems are much less productive than previously thought.

The Implications of Eco-Evolutionary Processes for the Emergence of Marine Plankton Community Biogeography.

Models of community assembly have been used to illustrate how the many functionally diverse species that compose plankton food webs can coexist. However, the evolutionary processes leading to the emergence of plankton food webs and their interplay with migratory processes and spatial heterogeneity are yet to be explored. We study the eco-evolutionary dynamics of a modeled plankton community structured in both size and space and physiologically constrained by empirical data.

The Size Dependence of Phytoplankton Growth Rates: A Trade-Off between Nutrient Uptake and Metabolism.

Rates of metabolism and population growth are often assumed to decrease universally with increasing organism size. Recent observations have shown, however, that maximum population growth rates among phytoplankton smaller than ∼6 μm in diameter tend to increase with organism size. Here we bring together observations and theory to demonstrate that the observed change in slope is attributable to a trade-off between nutrient uptake and the potential rate of internal metabolism.

Citations increase with manuscript length, author number, and references cited in ecology journals.

Most top impact factor ecology journals indicate a preference or requirement for short manuscripts; some state clearly defined word limits, whereas others indicate a preference for more concise papers. Yet evidence from a variety of academic fields indicates that within journals longer papers are both more positively reviewed by referees and more highly cited. We examine the relationship between citations received and manuscript length, number of authors, and number of references cited for papers published in 32 ecology journals between 2009 and 2012.

When everything is not everywhere but species evolve: an alternative method to model adaptive properties of marine ecosystems.

The functional and taxonomic biogeography of marine microbial systems reflects the current state of an evolving system. Current models of marine microbial systems and biogeochemical cycles do not reflect this fundamental organizing principle. Here, we investigate the evolutionary adaptive potential of marine microbial systems under environmental change and introduce explicit Darwinian adaptation into an ocean modelling framework, simulating evolving phytoplankton communities in space and time.