Seawater carbonate chemistry and biomass and fatty acid composition of a post-bloom marine plankton community

DOI

A mesocosm approach was used to investigate the effects of ocean acidification (OA) on a natural plankton community in coastal waters off Norway by manipulating CO2 partial pressure ( pCO2). Eight enclosures were deployed in the Raunefjord near Bergen. Treatment levels were ambient (320 µatm) and elevated pCO2 (~2000 µatm), each in 4 replicate enclosures. The experiment lasted for 53 d in May-June 2015. To assess impacts of OA on the plankton community, phytoplankton and protozooplankton biomass and total seston fatty acid content were analyzed. In both treatments, the plankton community was dominated by the dinoflagellate Ceratium longipes. In the elevated pCO2 treatment, however, biomass of this species as well as that of other dinoflagellates was strongly negatively affected. At the end of the experiment, total dinoflagellate biomass was 4-fold higher in the control group than under elevated pCO2 conditions. In a size comparison of C. longipes, cell size in the high pCO2 treatment was significantly larger. The ratio of polyunsaturated fatty acids to saturated fatty acids of seston decreased at high pCO2. In particular, the concentration of docosahexaenoic acid (C 22:6n3c), essential for development and reproduction of metazoans, was less than half at high pCO2 compared to ambient pCO2. Thus, elevated pCO2 led to a deterioration in the quality and quantity of food in a natural plankton community, with potential consequences for the transfer of matter and energy to higher trophic levels.

In order to allow full comparability with other ocean acidification data sets, the R package seacarb (Gattuso et al, 2021) was used to compute a complete and consistent set of carbonate system variables, as described by Nisumaa et al. (2010). In this dataset the original values were archived in addition with the recalculated parameters (see related PI). The date of carbonate chemistry calculation by seacarb is 2021-03-15.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.929270
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.3354/meps13390
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.911638
Related Identifier https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.896337
Related Identifier https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/seacarb/index.html
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.929270
Provenance
Creator Dörner, Isabel; Hauss, Helena ORCID logo; Aberle, Nicole ORCID logo; Lohbeck, Kai T; Spisla, Carsten; Riebesell, Ulf (ORCID: 0000-0002-9442-452X); Ismar, Stefanie M
Publisher PANGAEA
Contributor Yang, Yan
Publication Year 2020
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 5976 data points
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (5.206 LON, 60.265 LAT)
Temporal Coverage Begin 2015-05-09T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2015-06-30T00:00:00Z