The marine labile dissolved organic carbon (DOC) pool is a dynamic reservoir of thousands of molecules. After excretion or release by phytoplankton and other microbes, metabolites are rapidly consumed, resulting in very low standing concentrations (picomolar to low nanomolar). To date, marine phy...

The capacity of planktonic marine microorganisms to actively seek out and exploit microscale chemical hotspots has been widely theorized to affect ocean-basin scale biogeochemistry, but has never been examined comprehensively in situ among natural microbial communities. Here, using a field-based ...