The allometry of the smallest: superlinear scaling of microbial metabolic rates in the Atlantic Ocean

Garcia, Francisca C., Garcia-Martin, Enma Elena, Gonzalez Taboada, Fernando, Sal, Sofia, Serret, Pablo and Lopez-Urrutia, Ágel (2016) The allometry of the smallest: superlinear scaling of microbial metabolic rates in the Atlantic Ocean. The ISME Journal, 10 (5). 1029–1036. ISSN 1751-7362

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Abstract

Prokaryotic planktonic organisms are small in size but largely relevant in marine biogeochemical cycles. Due to their reduced size range (0.2 to 1 μm in diameter), the effects of cell size on their metabolism have been hardly considered and are usually not examined in field studies. Here, we show the results of size-fractionated experiments of marine microbial respiration rate along a latitudinal transect in the Atlantic Ocean. The scaling exponents obtained from the power relationship between respiration rate and size were significantly higher than one. This superlinearity was ubiquitous across the latitudinal transect but its value was not universal revealing a strong albeit heterogeneous effect of cell size on microbial metabolism. Our results suggest that the latitudinal differences observed are the combined result of changes in cell size and composition between functional groups within prokaryotes. Communities where the largest size fraction was dominated by prokaryotic cyanobacteria, especially Prochlorococcus, have lower allometric exponents. We hypothesize that these larger, more complex prokaryotes fall close to the evolutionary transition between prokaryotes and protists, in a range where surface area starts to constrain metabolism and, hence, are expected to follow a scaling closer to linearity.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Uncontrolled Keywords:	sdg 14 - life below water ,/dk/atira/pure/sustainabledevelopmentgoals/life_below_water
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	19 Dec 2015 07:19
Last Modified:	22 Oct 2022 00:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/55801
DOI:	10.1038/ismej.2015.203

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