Ice Cover as a Factor Driving Microbial Community Structure in the Laurentian Great Lakes
Abstract
Lakes serve as rapid responding sentinels of human influence on the natural environment rendering them powerful tools to advance our understanding of a changing climate on microbial community structure and function. Whereas we possess a baseline knowledge of microbial diversity in the Great Lakes, we know little about how these communities respond to the manifestations of climate change. Through collaboration with U.S.- and Canadian Coast Guards, winter surveys have been conducted on Lake Erie since 2007. The surveys have captured extremes in ice extent ranging from expansive ice cover through 2011 to nearly ice-free waters in winter 2012, a condition driven by a warm positive Arctic Oscillation. We showed that dramatic changes in annual ice cover were accompanied by equally dramatic shifts in phytoplankton community structure. Expansive ice cover documented for Lake Erie in winters 2010 and 2011 supported ice-associated phytoplankton blooms dominated by physiologically robust, filamentous centric diatoms. Transcriptomic analysis of the winter bloom offers insights into the success of this psychrophilic community. By comparison, ice free conditions promoted the growth of small-sized cells supported by analysis of size-fractionated chlorophyll a and flow cytometry. The phytoplankton community in winter 2013 was dominated by microplankton-sized filamentous diatoms, coincident with expansive ice cover and thus returning to the size structure of the 2010 and 2011 communities. Reduced size is recognized as a universal ecological response to global warming in aquatic systems although it usually marks a response to climate warming over multiple years, not a single season as reported here. Fig. 1. Winter surveys conducted on Lake Erie over two years demonstrated tight coupling between microplankton Chl a biomass and total Chl a during winter 2010-11 (purple, green), a year of expansive ice cover. A warm positive Arctic Oscillation resulted in negligible ice cover on Lake Erie in 2011-12. Coincident with the ice-free conditions, a strong departure from a microplankton-dominated system was documented (red, yellow).
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AGUFMOS22A..03M
- Keywords:
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- 0458 BIOGEOSCIENCES Limnology;
- 0746 CRYOSPHERE Lakes;
- 0716 CRYOSPHERE Cryobiology;
- 0465 BIOGEOSCIENCES Microbiology: ecology;
- physiology and genomics