Abstract
We examined the short-term variability, by daily to weekly sampling, of protist assemblages from March to July in surface water of the San Pedro Ocean Time-series station (eastern North Pacific), by V4 Illumina sequencing of the 18S rRNA gene. The sampling period encompassed a spring bloom followed by progression to summer conditions. Several protistan taxa displayed sharp increases and declines, with whole community Bray–Curtis dissimilarities of adjacent days being 66% in March and 40% in May. High initial abundance of parasitic Cercozoa Cryothecomonas longipes and Protaspis grandis coincided with a precipitous decline of blooming Pseudo-nitzschia diatoms, possibly suggesting their massive infection by these parasites; these cercozoans were hardly detectable afterwards. Canonical correspondence analysis indicated a limited predictability of community variability from environmental factors. This indicates that other factors are relevant in explaining changes in protist community composition at short temporal scales, such as interspecific relationships, stochastic processes, mixing with adjacent water, or advection of patches with different protist communities. Association network analysis revealed that interactions between the many parasitic OTUs and other taxa were overwhelmingly positive and suggest that although sometimes parasites may cause a crash of host populations, they may often follow their hosts and do not regularly cause enough mortality to potentially create negative correlations at the daily to weekly time scales we studied.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the USC Wrigley Institute of Environmental Science, especially Roberta Marinelli, Sean Conner, and Captain Gordon Boivin and the crew of the Miss Christie for sampling opportunities and laboratory space. This work was supported by NSF Grants 1031743 and 1136818, and grant GBMF3779 from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Marine Microbiology Initiative.
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Berdjeb, L., Parada, A., Needham, D.M. et al. Short-term dynamics and interactions of marine protist communities during the spring–summer transition. ISME J 12, 1907–1917 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-018-0097-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-018-0097-x
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