ArticleISME communications2021
Phytoplankton biodiversity and the inverted paradox.
Article in ISME communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Spatial Distributions of Active Pico- and Nano-Haptophytes (Eukaryota, Hacrobia) in the Tropical and Subtropical Western Pacific Ocean.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- Population genomics of a sailing siphonophore reveals genetic structure in the open ocean.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Conceptualizing phytoplankton communities in the absence of resource based competitive exclusion.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Distinct phytoplankton size classes respond differently to biotic and abiotic factors.ISME communications · 2025Article
- Identification of plankton habitats in the North Sea.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Chaotic turnover of rare and abundant species in a strongly interacting model community.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Stochastic and Deterministic Processes Regulate Phytoplankton Assemblages in a Temperate Coastal Ecosystem.Microbiology spectrum · 2022Article
- How do plankton species coexist in an apparently unstructured environment?Biology letters · 2022Article
- 'Boom-and-busted' dynamics of phytoplankton-virus interactions explain the paradox of the plankton.The New phytologist · 2022Article
- Phytoplankton community structuring in the absence of resource-based competitive exclusion.PloS one · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Earth's aquatic food webs are overwhelmingly supported by planktonic microalgae that live in the sunlit water column where only a minimum number of physical niches are readily identifiable. Despite this paucity of environmental differentiation, these "phytoplankton" populations exhibit a rich biodiversity, an observation not easily reconciled with broadly accepted rules of resource-based competitive exclusion. This conundrum is referred to as the "Paradox of the Plankton". Consideration of physical distancing between nutrient depletion zones around individual phytoplankton, however, suggests a competition-neutral resource landscape. Application of neutral theory to the sheer number of phytoplankton in physically-mixed water masses yields a prediction of astronomical biodiversity, suggesting the inverted paradox: Why are there so few phytoplankton species? Here, we introduce a trophic constraint on phytoplankton that, when combined with stochastic principals of ecological drift, predicts only modest levels of diversity in an otherwise competition-neutral landscape. Our "trophic exclusion" principle predicts diversity to be independent of population size and yields a species richness across cell-size classes that is consistent with broad oceanographic survey observations.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
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.