Project: EAGER: A Saturation Approach to Microzooplankton Grazing Rate Determination

NSF Award Abstract:

Heterotrophic protists are the dominant consumers of the 50% of global primary production by phytoplankton in the oceans. Hence, they play a key role in influencing ocean biogeochemistry, the composition of microbial communities, and transfer of energy to higher trophic levels. The aim of the project is to develop a novel saturation approach to quantify the rates of grazing on phytoplankton by phagotrophic protists in the ocean. As a proof-of-concept, this study will focus on determining grazing rates on picophytoplankton. This smallest size-class of phytoplankton often dominates oceanic primary production and can contribute up to 50% of annual primary production in coastal waters. Understanding grazing is of critical importance to understanding how planktonic communities function and respond to environmental change has the important societal benefit of potentially more accurately predicting the future of global fisheries and interactions between ocean and atmosphere that influence our climate. The project incorporates experiential education of undergraduates in the research environment and biological oceanography and will be a feature of an Advanced Aquatic Flow Courses designed for graduate students, faculty members and commercial entities. Public engagement in the science will be through Cafe Scientifique presentations and the series of Open House events that occur at Bigelow Laboratory through the year.

The motivation behind this project is that challenges in performing and interpreting current experimental measurements of herbivory by protists in the ocean constrain our understanding of this key process. The basis of the present approach is saturation of the grazers with a surrogate prey, resulting in release of grazing pressure on the natural prey. Measurement of the resulting increased growth rate of the natural prey provides a value for the rate of grazing. The project involves laboratory experiments using cultures of model predator-prey combinations to select suitable surrogate prey and test the underlying theoretical assumptions of the approach. This information will then be used to inform the design of experiments on natural planktonic communities. The objectives of these experiments are to test the efficacy of the saturation approach and to compare results to traditional experimental approaches run in parallel. This research will introduce a new approach to biological oceanography that will have been thoroughly tested, with recommendations for optimum set-up procedures and an assessment of the factors that influence uncertainty in the results. The saturation approach has potential advantages over previous methods. It lends itself to analysis by flow cytometry allowing high throughput and accurate measurements, avoids manipulation of the natural seawater and microbial communities, and provides growth and grazing information on defined components of the phytoplankton community.