ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2015
Light-driven synchrony of Prochlorococcus growth and mortality in the subtropical Pacific gyre.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed, 139 citations in OpenAlex.
- Models and co-culture experiments assess four mechanisms of phytoplankton-bacteria interactions.Nature microbiology · 2026Article
- Future ocean warming may cause large reductions in Prochlorococcus biomass and productivity.Nature microbiology · 2025Article
- Light-Mediated Population Dynamics of Picocyanobacteria Shaping the Diurnal Patterns of Microbial Communities in an Atoll Lagoon.Microorganisms · 2025Article
- Article
- Experimental and field comparisons of two common methods for measuring microzooplankton grazing rates.Frontiers in microbiology · 2025Article
- Disentangling top-down drivers of mortality underlying diel population dynamics of Prochlorococcus in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Innovative strategy for the conservation of a millennial mausoleum from biodeterioration through artificial light management.NPJ biofilms and microbiomes · 2023Article
- Choanoflagellates alongside diverse uncultured predatory protists consume the abundant open-ocean cyanobacteriumProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Understanding opposing predictions of Prochlorococcus in a changing climate.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Diel variations in planktonic ciliate community structure in the northern South China Sea and tropical Western Pacific.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- MODELING CELL POPULATIONS MEASURED BY FLOW CYTOMETRY WITH COVARIATES USING SPARSE MIXTURE OF REGRESSIONS.The annals of applied statistics · 2023Article
- Basin-scale biogeography of Prochlorococcus and SAR11 ecotype replication.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Abundant and cosmopolitan lineage of cyanopodoviruses lacking a DNA polymerase gene.The ISME journal · 2023Article
- Differential Timing for Glucose Assimilation inMicrobiology spectrum · 2022Article
- Viruses affect picocyanobacterial abundance and biogeography in the North Pacific Ocean.Nature microbiology · 2022Article
- A Bayesian approach to modeling phytoplankton population dynamics from size distribution time series.PLoS computational biology · 2022Article
- Synoptic Mesoscale to Basin Scale Variability in Biological Productivity and Chlorophyll in the Kuroshio Extension Region.Journal of geophysical research. Oceans · 2021Article
- Abrupt shifts in 21st-century plankton communities.Science advances · 2021Article
- Diel cycle of sea spray aerosol concentration.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Particulate Metabolites and Transcripts Reflect Diel Oscillations of Microbial Activity in the Surface Ocean.mSystems · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
9 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Theoretical studies predict that competition for limited resources reduces biodiversity to the point of ecological instability, whereas strong predator/prey interactions enhance the number of coexisting species and limit fluctuations in abundances. In open ocean ecosystems, competition for low availability of essential nutrients results in relatively few abundant microbial species. The remarkable stability in overall cell abundance of the dominant photosynthetic cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus is assumed to reflect a simple food web structure strongly controlled by grazers and/or viruses. This hypothesized link between stability and ecological interactions, however, has been difficult to test with open ocean microbes because sampling methods commonly have poor temporal and spatial resolution. Here we use continuous techniques on two different winter-time cruises to show that Prochlorococcus cell production and mortality rates are tightly synchronized to the day/night cycle across the subtropical Pacific Ocean. In warmer waters, we observed harmonic oscillations in cell production and mortality rates, with a peak in mortality rate consistently occurring ∼6 h after the peak in cell production. Essentially no cell mortality was observed during daylight. Our results are best explained as a synchronized two-component trophic interaction with the per-capita rates of Prochlorococcus consumption driven either directly by the day/night cycle or indirectly by Prochlorococcus cell production. Light-driven synchrony of food web dynamics in which most of the newly produced Prochlorococcus cells are consumed each night likely enforces ecosystem stability across vast expanses of the open ocean.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.