AI Article Synopsis
- Heterotrophic flagellates are crucial in aquatic ecosystems, acting as a key link between bacteria and larger consumers in the food web.
- They play a significant role in biomass and nutrient recycling, efficiently consuming viruses, bacteria, and small phytoplankton.
- The paper reviews their ecological relationships and overall trophic role within both marine and freshwater plankton communities.
Article Abstract
In aquatic environments heterotrophic flagellates are an important component within the microbial loop and the food web, owing to their involvement in the energy transfer and flux and as an intermediate link between bacteria and primary producers, and greater organisms, such as other protists and metazoan consumers. In the microbial loop heterotrophic flagellates highly contribute to fast biomass and nutrient recycling and to the production in aquatic environments. In fact, these protists consume efficiently viruses, bacteria, cyanobacteria and picophytoplankton, and are grazed mainly by other protists, rotifers and small crustaceans. In this paper the knowledge about these unicellular organisms is reviewed, taking into particular account their ecological relationships and trophic role within the plankton community of marine and freshwater environments.
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