Disentangling top-down drivers of mortality underlying diel population dynamics of Prochlorococcus in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.

ABSTRACT: Photosynthesis fuels primary production at the base of marine food webs. Yet, in many surface ocean ecosystems, diel-driven primary production is tightly coupled to daily loss. This tight coupling raises the question: which top-down drivers predominate in maintaining persistently stable picocyanobacterial populations over longer time scales? Motivated by high-frequency surface water measurements taken in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre (NPSG), we developed multitrophic models to investigate bottom-up and top-down mechanisms underlying the balanced control of Prochlorococcus populations. We find that incorporating photosynthetic growth with viral- and predator-induced mortality is sufficient to recapitulate daily oscillations of Prochlorococcus abundances with baseline community abundanc

SUBMITTER: Beckett SJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10920773 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature