What is it about?
The Gulf of Mexico (GoM) is a dynamic marine ecosystem influenced by multiple natural and anthropogenic processes and inputs, such as the intrusion of warm oligotrophic water via the Loop Current, freshwater and nutrient input by the Mississippi River, and hydrocarbon inputs via natural seeps and industrial spills. Microbial plankton communities are important to pelagic food webs including in the GoM but understanding the drivers of the natural dynamics of these passively distributed microorganisms can be challenging in such a large and heterogeneous system.
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Why is it important?
Our results show dramatic community shifts across depths, especially between photic and aphotic zones. Though we only have two time points within a single year, observed temporal shifts in microbial plankton communities were restricted to the seasonally influenced epipelagic zone (0–200 m), and appear mainly driven by changes in temperature. Environmental selection in microbial plankton communities was depth-specific, with variables such as turbidity, salinity, and abundance of photosynthetic taxa strongly correlating with community structure in the epipelagic zone, while variables such as oxygen and specific nutrient concentrations were correlated with community structure at deeper depths.
Perspectives
Our results add to the growing body of knowledge of GoM microbial plankton and expand our understanding by more extensively sampling the oceanic pelagic environment across broad spatial, temporal and depth ranges. Taken together, our results add valuable insight into the forces that structure oceanic-pelagic microbial plankton communities in the GoM and provide a foundation for future studies investigating topics such as the effects of microbe-microbe networks on the structure microbial plankton communities, and the use of these communities as tracers of converging water masses in the GoM.
Jose Lopez
Nova Southeastern University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Depth-Dependent Environmental Drivers of Microbial Plankton Community Structure in the Northern Gulf of Mexico, Frontiers in Microbiology, January 2019, Frontiers,
DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2018.03175.
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