The global distribution and climate resilience of marine heterotrophic prokaryotes

Ryan Heneghan; Jacinta Holloway-Brown; Josep Gasol; Gerhard Herndl; Xosé Anxelu Morán; Eric Galbraith

doi:10.1038/s41467-024-50635-z

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The global distribution and climate resilience of marine heterotrophic prokaryotes

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The global distribution and climate resilience of marine heterotrophic prokaryotes

Ryan Heneghan, Jacinta Holloway-Brown, Josep Gasol, Gerhard Herndl, Xosé Anxelu Morán and Eric Galbraith

Nature Communications, Vol.15, pp.1-11

2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-50635-z

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The global distribution and climate resilience of marine heterotrophic prokaryot...

Abstract

environmental health

marine biology

microbial ecology

Heterotrophic Bacteria and Archaea (prokaryotes) are a major component of marine food webs and global biogeochemical cycles. Yet, there is limited understanding about how prokaryotes vary across global environmental gradients, and how their global abundance and metabolic activity (production and respiration) may be affected by climate change. Using global datasets of prokaryotic abundance, cell carbon and metabolic activity we reveal that mean prokaryotic biomass varies by just under 3-fold across the global surface ocean, while total prokaryotic metabolic activity increases by more than one order of magnitude from polar to tropical coastal and upwelling regions. Under climate change, global prokaryotic biomass in surface waters is projected to decline ~1.5% per °C of warming, while prokaryotic respiration will increase ~3.5% ( ~ 0.85 Pg C yr−1). The rate of prokaryotic biomass decline is one-third that of zooplankton and fish, while the rate of increase in prokaryotic respiration is double. This suggests that future, warmer oceans could be increasingly dominated by prokaryotes, diverting a growing proportion of primary production into microbial food webs and away from higher trophic levels as well as reducing the capacity of the deep ocean to sequester carbon, all else being equal.

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Title: The global distribution and climate resilience of marine heterotrophic prokaryotes
Authors: Ryan Heneghan (Corresponding Author) - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Science, Technology and Engineering
Jacinta Holloway-Brown (Author) - The University of Adelaide
Josep Gasol (Author) - Institute of Marine Sciences
Gerhard Herndl (Author) - University of Vienna
Xosé Anxelu Morán (Author) - Instituto Español de Oceanografía
Eric Galbraith (Author) - McGill University
Publication details: Nature Communications, Vol.15, pp.1-11
Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
Date published: 2024
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-50635-z
ISSN: 2041-1723
Copyright note: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Data Availability: See article for data availability.
Grant note: G.J.H. was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) project. DEPOCA AP3558721. J.M.G. by project PID2021-125469NB-C31 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and by the Severo Ochoa Centre of Excellence accreditation CEX2019-000928-S. This project was supported by the Canada Research Chairs Program fund number CRC-2020-00108 to E.D.G. The project CSD2008-00077 supported the collection of the Malaspina dataset (J.M.G. and X.A.G.M.).
Organisation Unit: School of Science, Technology and Engineering
Language: English
Record Identifier: 991059998302621
Output Type: Journal article

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