Primary production of phytoplankton estimated by means of the dilution method in coastal waters

The development and application of a dilution method for measuring primary production in coastal waters is described

Dilution effects on microzooplankton in dilution grazing experiments

International audienceIn dilution experiments, filtered seawater is used to create a gradient of grazing pressure on phytoplankton. Microzooplankton grazing is estimated by examining phytoplankton growth within the gradient. However, the dilution series also represents a resource gradient for microzooplankton. Here we report the effects of dilution on grazers. In 2 standard dilution experiments, using communities from the eutrophic (chlorophyll a = 12 to 15 mu g l(-1)) Rhode River Estuary, we examined the effects of dilution on different groups of microzooplankters: rotifers, tintinnid ciliates, oligotrich ciliates, predacious ciliates, and Mesodinium rubrum. Apparent growth rates of tintinnids and oligotrichs varied with prey concentration, decreasing with the dilution factor from about +0.5 d(-1) in undiluted whole water to about -1 d(-1) in the 5% whole water, closely resembling numerical response curves. Among tintinnids, there was an increase in the relative abundance of larger tintinnids in the time 24 h samples of dilute treatments compared to the less dilute treatments. No consistent dilution effect was shown by rotifers or predacious ciliates. The growth rates of the photosynthetic ciliate M. rubrum increased with dilution, resembling the typical pattern of chlorophyll a and autotrophic nanoplankton. Grazer growth in undiluted waters and grazer mortality in dilute water may be common and result in uncertainty in measured grazing rates. We urge that grazers be examined in grazing experiments not only to assess possible artifacts in grazing rate estimates, but also to provide information, beyond a simple grazing rate, on the grazer populations

Recovering growth and grazing rates from nonlinear dilution experiments

Biological rate measurements provide critical information for understanding key processes and modeling future states of marine ecosystems. Experimentally derived rates can be challenging to interpret when methodological assumptions are untested or potentially violated under variable natural conditions, such as the assumed linear grazing response of the dilution technique for estimating rates of phytoplankton growth and microzooplankton grazing impact. Here, we show that grazing nonlinearity can be related to the ratio of initial phytoplankton biomass to the half-saturation parameter in the Holling II model, while not being affected by varying grazer biomass during dilution experiments. From this, we present theory to recover growth and grazing rates from multi-treatment dilution experiments with nonlinear grazing results. We test our analyses with data collected during the California Current Ecosystem-Long-Term Ecological Research (CCE-LTER) program. We show that using a linear regression in 2-treatment dilution experiments may lead to underestimates of microzooplankton grazing rates, particularly in high-phytoplankton-biomass coastal regions where grazing can be saturated. Using the Holling II grazing model and a correction factor, growth and grazing rates from 2-treatment experiments can also be estimated, as illustrated by application to Lagrangian water-tracking studies of growth and grazing dynamics in the CCE