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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Sam Wilson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© The Author(s) 2024. 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 abundances. In doing so, we infer that grazers in this environment function as the predominant top-down factor despite high standing viral particle densities. The model-data fits also reveal the ecological relevance of light-dependent viral traits and non-canonical factors to cellular loss. Finally, we leverage sensitivity analyses to demonstrate how variation in life history traits across distinct oceanic contexts, including variation in viral adsorption and grazer clearance rates, can transform the quantitative and even qualitative importance of top-down controls in shaping Prochlorococcus population dynamics.
Author(s): Beckett SJ, Demory D, Coenen AR, Casey JR, Dugenne M, Follett CL, Connell P, Carlson MCG, Hu SK, Wilson ST, Muratore D, Rodriguez-Gonzalez RA, Peng S, Becker KW, Mende DR, Armbrust EV, Caron DA, Lindell D, White AE, Ribalet F, Weitz JS
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Nature Communications
Year: 2024
Volume: 15
Issue: 1
Online publication date: 07/03/2024
Acceptance date: 16/02/2024
Date deposited: 10/04/2025
ISSN (electronic): 2041-1723
Publisher: Springer Nature
URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46165-3
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-46165-3
Data Access Statement: The data sources that we use in our analysis have been published. Prochlorococcus cell abundances are from Ribalet et al. 2020, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3994953, free virus and percentage of infected Prochlorococcus cells are from Mruwat et al. 2021, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-020-00752-6, and heterotrophic nanoflagellate abundances are from Connell et al. 2020, https://doi.org/10.3354/ame01950. All data from analyses, including for ECLIP and Bayesian parameter inference are archived on Zenodo, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1053039884.
PubMed id: 38453897
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