Carbon and nitrogen flow through pelagic microheterotrophic communities

Abstract

The significance of the microheterotrophic community of bacteria and Protozoa in marine systems is reviewed. In surface waters, bacterial production may be linked to cycles of photosynthetically produced dissolved organic matter released from living phytoplankton. The bacteria then form a principal food resource for grazing Protozoa which are themselves potentially available for exploitation by higher trophic levels. Recent data suggest that the interaction between Protozoa and their bacterial prey may be a good deal more complicated than this simple predator-prey relationship implies. Ciliates may show either “steady-state” or strongly cyclical relationships with their bacterial prey, whose community may in turn be supported to a large extent by the release of dissolved organic matter by the ciliate population. This implies that the low standing stocks of bacteria commonly recorded in many pelagic systems may be sustained, as well as exploited, by bacterivorous Protozoa. In other systems, bacterial production may enter the larger zooplankton directly without involvement of the bacteria-Protozoa-bacteria loop. However, the microheterotrophic community of bacteria and Protozoa in general represents a competitive pathway down which a significant proportion of carbon from primary production may be channelled, compared with that flowing directly into the grazing zooplankton and thence to fish. Despite the high primary production which characterizes temporally unstable areas such as the southern Benguela upwelling system, the carrying capacity for fish may therefore be considerably less than that which might be anticipated for a simple herbivore-dominated food chain. © 1987 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.