Measurement of Bacterioplankton Growth in the Sea and Its Regulation by Environmental Conditions

Abstract

The last few years have witnessed something of a revolution in our view of the role of bacteria in the marine environment. It is now being recognized that bacteria play a quantitatively significant role in the flow of energy and matter in marine ecosystems. The central theme of this "new view" is based on two lines of evidence: (1) bacterial biomass is a significant part of the total biomass in the oceans (Hobbie et al. 1977), and (2) the bacterioplankton is, metabolically, a highly active component of marine biota (Pomeroy 1974; Williams 1981; Azam and Hodson 1977; Hagström et al. 1979; Fuhrman and Azam 1980, 1982). This thinking is diametrically opposed to the conventional wisdom which portrays bacterioplankton as quantitatively trivial and, even today, insists that dormancy due to insufficient nitrients is the dominant physiological state of most bacteria.