The top layers of water bodies, a most important although relatively neglected piece of the biosphere plumbing
In: Scientia Marina (Barcelona). Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Institut de Ciènces del Mar: Barcelona. ISSN 0214-8358; e-ISSN 1886-8134, more
Also appears in:Gili, J.-M.; Pretus, J.L.; Packard, T.T. (Ed.) (2001). A Marine Science Odyssey into the 21st Century: 36th European Marine Biology Symposium, Maó (Menorca), 17-22 September 2001. European Marine Biology Symposia, 36. Scientia Marina (Barcelona), 65(Suppl. 2). 326 pp. https://dx.doi.org/10.3989/scimar.2001.65s2, more
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| Keyword |
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| Author keywords |
picoplankton, light reducing power, nitrite, ocean surface valve, dinoflagellates, coccolithophorides, Western Mediterranean |
| Abstract |
Reducing power from light is used by plant life in ways that shift along ecological succession. When nutrients are non limiting, growth prevails; when essential nutrients (in the first place P) become scarce, reducing power is applied somehow and otherwise, often, as in red tides, in the synthesis of toxics. On land, the same reducing capacity results in the production of wood, terpenes, essences, cork or rubber. In water bodies, reduction of nitrate at least adds nitrite to the environment. Very likely this explains the common presence of nitrite-enriched layers around the levels of twilight. A large fraction of the generating capacity might be expected to come from the small prokaryota of phytoplankton, which almost global ubiquity and capacity to persist alive in a state of forced minimal activity are known. The result might be a kind of one-way plankton surface valve, that isolates partially and in some chemical aspects the deeper ocean from the top layers. One could perhaps speak of a surface valve with a planetary role. |
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