Fig. 1
From: Conceptualizing phytoplankton communities in the absence of resource based competitive exclusion
Properties of natural phytoplankton populations. (a) Across all open ocean nutrient conditions, phytoplankton populations exhibit continuous size distributions with slopes typically ranging from − 3.5 to − 4.5 between the logarithm of cell number concentration per unit length and the logarithm of equivalent spherical cell diameter, with steeper slopes observed in more nutrient impoverished waters13,25. Division rates are progressively more diffusion-limited as cell size increases (red arrow), implying that competitive potential for resources increases with decreasing cell size (green arrow). Data shown here were collected in the north Atlantic subtropical gyre (from91). (b) Conceptual illustration of the nutrient field experienced by phytoplankton (a 2-dimensional slice through a 3-dimensional field), showing reductions in nutrient concentration through the boundary layers of four, variably-spaced phytoplankton cells being supplied by diffusion of nutrients from the far-field. In nature, cell-to-cell spacing is typically greater than depicted in this figure and far-field nutrient concentrations (S∞) are not necessarily uniform as in this illustration, but can exhibit short-lived, high-concentration patches resulting from discrete sources of recycled nutrients (e.g., zooplankton excretion).
