Phytoplankton Temperature Adaptation: Upstream or Local Temperature?

Biogeography studies that aim to understand the role of environmental variables are typically based on local conditions. However, in cases with substantial translocation, like for planktonic organisms carried by ocean currents, selection may happen upstream and the local environmental factors may not be representative of those that shaped the local population. Here we use an agent-based model of microbes in the global surface ocean to explore this effect for temperature. We simulate up to 25 million individual cells belonging to up to 50 species with different temperature optima. Microbes are moved around the globe based on a hydrodynamic model, and grow and die based on local temperature. The optimum temperature at each location and time is defined as the optimum temperature of the most abundant species. This allows us to quantify the role of currents using the “advective temperature differential” metric, which is the optimum temperature of the model with advection minus that from the model without advection. Our results suggest that the differential depends on the location and growth rate. Poleward-flowing currents, like the Gulf Stream, generally experience cooling and the differential is positive. For slow-growing microbes like heterotrophic bacteria, the differential can be up to 4 °C in these areas. In other words, ignoring currents introduces an error of up to 4 °C in a biogeographic analysis. We compare our model to observations of optimum growth temperature for phytoplankton. Accounting for the effect of currents leads to a slightly better agreement with observations, but there is large variability in the observations and the improvement is not statistically significant.

Image Description: Advective temperature differential (DT_opt) across the global ocean, defined as the difference between optimum temperatures from simulation with and without advective transport. Population average growth rate = 0.14/d.