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Temperature and zooplankton size structure: climate control and basin-scale comparison in the North Pacific.

ABSTRACT: The global distribution of zooplankton community structure is known to follow latitudinal temperature gradients: larger species in cooler, higher latitudinal regions. However, interspecific relationships between temperature and size in zooplankton communities have not been fully examined in terms of temporal variation. To re-examine the relationship on a temporal scale and the effects of climate control thereon, we investigated the variation in copepod size structure in the eastern and western subarctic North Pacific in 2000-2011. This report presents the first basin-scale comparison of zooplankton community changes in the North Pacific based on a fully standardized data set obtained from the Continuous Plankton Recorder (CPR) survey. We found an increase in copepod community size (CCS) after 2006-2007 in the both regions because of the increased dominance of large cold-water species. Sea surface temperature varied in an east-west dipole manner, showing the typical Pacific Decadal Oscillation pattern: cooling in the east and warming in the west after 2006-2007. The observed positive correlation between CCS and sea surface temperature in the western North Pacific was inconsistent with the conventional interspecific temperature-size relationship. We explained this discrepancy by the geographical shift of the upper boundary of the thermal niche, the 9°C isotherm, of large cold-water species. In the eastern North Pacific, the boundary stretched northeast, to cover a large part of the sampling area after 2006-2007. In contrast, in the western North Pacific, the isotherm location hardly changed and the sampling area remained within its thermal niche throughout the study period, despite the warming that occurred. Our study suggests that while a climate-induced basin-scale cool-warm cycle can alter copepod community size and might subsequently impact the functions of the marine ecosystem in the North Pacific, the interspecific temperature-size relationship is not invariant and that understanding region-specific processes linking climate and ecosystem is indispensable.

SUBMITTER: Chiba S

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4338978 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Biomass distribution among size classes follows a power law where the Log-abundance of taxa scales to Log-size with a slope that responds to environmental abiotic and biotic conditions. The interactions between ecological mechanisms controlling the slope of locally realized size-abundance relationships (SAR) are however not well understood. Here we tested how warming, nutrient levels, and grazing affect the slope of phytoplankton community SARs in decadal time-series from eight Swiss lakes of the peri-alpine region, which underwent environmental forcing due to climate change and oligotrophication. We expected rising temperature to have a negative effect on slope (favoring small phytoplankton), and increasing nutrient levels and grazing pressure to have a positive effect (benefiting large phytoplankton). Using a random forest approach to extract robust patterns from the noisy data, we found that the effects of temperature (direct and indirect through water column stability), nutrient availability (phosphorus and total biomass), and large herbivore (copepods and daphnids) grazing and selectivity on slope were non-linear and interactive. Increasing water temperature or total grazing pressure, and decreasing phosphorus levels, had a positive effect on slope (favoring large phytoplankton, which are predominantly mixotrophic in the lake dataset). Our results therefore showed patterns that were opposite to the expected long-term effects of temperature and nutrient levels, and support a paradigm in which (i) small phototrophic phytoplankton appear to be favored under high nutrients levels, low temperature and low grazing, and (ii) large mixotrophic algae are favored under oligotrophic conditions when temperature and grazing pressure are high. The effects of temperature were stronger under nutrient limitation, and the effects of nutrients and grazing were stronger at high temperature. Our study shows that the phytoplankton local SARs in lakes respond to both the independent and the interactive effects of resources, grazing and water temperature in a complex, unexpected way, and observations from long-term studies can deviate significantly from general theoretical expectations.

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Temperature and zooplankton size structure: climate control and basin-scale comparison in the North Pacific.

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