Current Velocity in Streams and the Composition of Benthic Algal Mats

1986 ◽  
Vol 43 (6) ◽  
pp. 1156-1162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael A. Reiter ◽  
Robert E. Carlson

Water velocity is commonly accepted as a factor in the development of benthic algal mats in streams. Within a stream, two different zones of velocity are observed: the free-water velocity of the open water and the local velocity near the stream substrate. A closed laboratory flume system was used to observe the taxonomic composition of benthic algal mats and corresponding changes in the local velocities under different free-water velocities. As the algal mat developed under each experimental velocity, local velocities diminished and eventually became equal in all sections, while free-water velocities remained different. After a period of maximum taxonomic diversity during the first 2 wk of mat development, taxonomic composition, relative abundance of the taxa, and dry weight biomass became increasingly similar in the three velocity regimes, although the mats appeared different upon casual observation. Differences in composition and morphology in natural algal mats may not result from differences in current velocity, and the idea of a "closed monolayer" algal mat may not be appropriate in all situations.

1980 ◽  
Vol 58 (6) ◽  
pp. 591-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morten Søndergaard ◽  
Robert G. Wetzel

The presence and magnitude of photorespiration in the submersed freshwater angiosperm Scirpus subterminalis Torr. was investigated by gas-exchange characteristics in an open water-flow system. The minimal rates of photorespiration during active photosynthesis were measured by following the time course of differential 14CO2 and 12CO2 uptake. At 8 mg O2 L−1 (equal to oxygen saturation at 20 °C), the rate was 0.4 μg C (mg organic dry weight)−1 h−1, which was about 10% of net photosynthesis under the experimental conditions. Increasing the oxygen concentration to 30 mg O2 L−1, enhanced photorespiration to 30% of net photosynthesis. It was shown that the concentration of oxygen affected net photosynthesis, CO2 evolution into CO2-free water in the light, the post-illumination CO2 burst, and the CO2 compensation point.The effect of the internal gas space on recycling of CO2 was investigated by comparing gas-exchange by intact and sectioned leaves. About 30% of the CO2 of photorespiratory origin was recycled internally within the lacunal system. The gas-exchange characteristics of Scirpus were similar to those observed in terrestrial C3 species although of a minor magnitude and a different time course. The ecological implications of these finds are discussed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qinggeer BORJIGIN ◽  
Bizhou ZHANG ◽  
Xiaofang Yu ◽  
Julin Gao ◽  
Xin ZHANG ◽  
...  

Abstract A lignocellulolytic microbial consortium holds promise for the in situ biodegradation of crop straw and the comprehensive and effective utilization of agricultural waste. In this study, we applied metagenomics technology to comprehensively explore the metabolic functional potential and taxonomic diversity of the microbial consortia CS (cultured on corn stover) and FP (cultured on filter paper).Analyses of the metagenomics taxonomic affiliation data showed considerable differences in the taxonomic composition and functional profile of the microbial consortia CS and FP. The microbial consortia CS primarily contained members from the genera Pseudomonas, Stenotrophomonas, Achromobacter, Dysgonomonas, Flavobacterium and Sphingobacterium, as well as Cellvibrio, Azospirillum, Pseudomonas, Dysgonomonas and Cellulomonas in FP. The COG and KEGG annotation analyses revealed considerable levels of diversity. Further analysis determined that the CS consortium had an increase in the acid and ester metabolism pathways, while carbohydrate metabolism was enriched in the FP consortium. Furthermore, a comparison against the CAZy database showed that the microbial consortia CS and FP contain a rich diversity of lignocellulose degrading families, in which GH5, GH6, GH9, GH10, GH11, GH26, GH42, and GH43 were enriched in the FP consortium, and GH44, GH28, GH2, and GH29 increased in the CS consortium. The degradative mechanism of lignocellulose metabolism by the two microbial consortia is similar, but the annotation of quantity of genes indicated that they are diverse and vary greatly. The lignocellulolytic microbial consortia cultured under different carbon conditions (CS and FP) differed substantially in their composition of the microbial community at the genus level. The changes in functional diversity were accompanied with variation in the composition of microorganisms, many of which are related to the degradation of lignocellulolytic materials. The genera Pseudomonas, Dysgonomonas and Sphingobacterium in CS and the genera Cellvibrio and Pseudomonas in FP exhibited a much wider distribution of lignocellulose degradative ability.


Solid Earth ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 537-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. E. T. Quinquis ◽  
S. J. H. Buiter

Abstract. Subduction of oceanic lithosphere brings water into the Earth's upper mantle. Previous numerical studies have shown how slab dehydration and mantle hydration can impact the dynamics of a subduction system by allowing a more vigorous mantle flow and promoting localisation of deformation in the lithosphere and mantle. The depths at which dehydration reactions occur in the hydrated portions of the slab are well constrained in these models by thermodynamic calculations. However, computational models use different numerical schemes to simulate the migration of free water. We aim to show the influence of the numerical scheme of free water migration on the dynamics of the upper mantle and more specifically the mantle wedge. We investigate the following three simple migration schemes with a finite-element model: (1) element-wise vertical migration of free water, occurring independent of the flow of the solid phase; (2) an imposed vertical free water velocity; and (3) a Darcy velocity, where the free water velocity is a function of the pressure gradient caused by the difference in density between water and the surrounding rocks. In addition, the flow of the solid material field also moves the free water in the imposed vertical velocity and Darcy schemes. We first test the influence of the water migration scheme using a simple model that simulates the sinking of a cold, hydrated cylinder into a dry, warm mantle. We find that the free water migration scheme has only a limited impact on the water distribution after 1 Myr in these models. We next investigate slab dehydration and mantle hydration with a thermomechanical subduction model that includes brittle behaviour and viscous water-dependent creep flow laws. Our models demonstrate that the bound water distribution is not greatly influenced by the water migration scheme whereas the free water distribution is. We find that a bound water-dependent creep flow law results in a broader area of hydration in the mantle wedge, which feeds back to the dynamics of the system by the associated weakening. This finding underlines the importance of using dynamic time evolution models to investigate the effects of (de)hydration. We also show that hydrated material can be transported down to the base of the upper mantle at 670 km. Although (de)hydration processes influence subduction dynamics, we find that the exact numerical implementation of free water migration is not important in the basic schemes we investigated. A simple implementation of water migration could be sufficient for a first-order impression of the effects of water for studies that focus on large-scale features of subduction dynamics.


2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 276-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph T. Eastman

Antarctica is a continental island and the waters of its shelf and upper slope are an insular evolutionary site. The shelf waters resemble a closed basin in the Southern Ocean, separated from other continents by distance, current patterns and subzero temperatures. The benthic fish fauna of the shelf and upper slope of the Antarctic Region includes 213 species with higher taxonomic diversity confined to 18 families. Ninety-six notothenioids, 67 liparids and 23 zoarcids comprise 45%, 32% and 11% of the fauna, a combined total of 88%. In high latitude (71–78°S) shelf areas notothenioids dominate abundance and biomass at levels of 90–95%. Notothenioids are also morphologically and ecologically diverse. Although they lack a swim bladder, the hallmark of the notothenioid radiation has been repeated diversification into water column habitats. There are pelagic, semipelagic, cryopelagic and epibenthic species. Notothenioids exhibit the disproportionate speciosity and high endemism characteristic of fish species flock. Antifreeze glycopeptides originating from a transformed trypsinogen gene are a key innovation. It is not known when the modern Antarctic shelf fauna assumed its current taxonomic composition. A late Eocene fossil fauna was taxonomically diverse and cosmopolitan. There was a subsequent faunal replacement with little carryover of families into the modern fauna. Basal notothenioid clades probably diverged in Gondwanan shelf locations during the early Tertiary. Dates inferred from molecular sequences suggest that phyletically derived Antarctic clades arose 15–5 m.y.a.


PeerJ ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. e5662
Author(s):  
Joanna Pakulnicka ◽  
Andrzej Zawal

Dystrophic lakes undergo natural disharmonic succession, in the course of which an increasingly complex and diverse, mosaic-like pattern of habitats evolves. In the final seral stage, the most important role is played by a spreading Sphagnum mat, which gradually reduces the lake’s open water surface area. Long-term transformations in the primary structure of lakes cause changes in the structure of lake-dwelling fauna assemblages. Knowledge of the succession mechanisms in lake fauna is essential for proper lake management. The use of fractal concepts helps to explain the character of fauna in relation to other aspects of the changing complexity of habitats. Our 12-year-long study into the succession of water beetles has covered habitats of 40 selected lakes which are diverse in terms of the fractal dimension. The taxonomic diversity and density of lake beetles increase parallel to an increase in the fractal dimension. An in-depth analysis of the fractal structure proved to be helpful in explaining the directional changes in fauna induced by the natural succession of lakes. Negative correlations appear between the body size and abundance. An increase in the density of beetles within the higher dimension fractals is counterbalanced by a change in the size of individual organisms. As a result, the biomass is constant, regardless of the fractal dimension.


2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-250

In coastal marine environments, with shallow, warm and calm waters, it is sometimes possible to observe the presence of organosedimentary structures that are commonly flat and laminar in shape. These structures are called algal mats or recent stromatolites due to their remarkable similarities to fossil stromatolites. The aim of this work was the study of the distribution of the various forms of Cu and Cd in the main layers of coastal algal mats in a closed bay at Anavissos, on the coast of Saronikos Gulf. Small sediment cores were collected from one point inside the cove on a seasonal basis and the trace metals extracted according to the BCR sequential extraction method. The main results of the study were: Most of the labile Cd was associated with small inorganic grains or lime particles. The contribution of the fraction associated with Mn and Fe oxides, was similar to that adsorbed to organic compounds and sulfides. The high contribution of the labile Cd to the total element (over 85%) was a strong indication of anthropogenic origin. On the other hand, most of the Cu in the sediment was associated with the crystal lattice (74%). Cu showed increased seasonal fluctuation; most of its labile forms were associated with organic compounds and sulfides whereas the less abundant form was that associated with Mn and Fe oxides. On the whole, the sediments were slightly enriched in Cd, while the concentrations of Cu were normal for the region.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hsin-Nan Lin ◽  
Yaw-Ling Lin ◽  
Wen-Lian Hsu

ABSTRACTCharacterizing the taxonomic diversity of a microbial community is very important to understand the roles of microorganisms. Next generation sequencing (NGS) provides great potential for investigation of a microbial community and leads to Metagenomic studies. NGS generates DNA fragment sequences directly from microorganism samples, and it requires analysis tools to identify microbial species (or taxonomic composition) and estimate their relative abundance in the studied community. However, only a few tools could achieve strain-level identification and most tools estimate the microbial abundances simply according to the read counts. An evaluation study on metagenomic analysis tools concludes that the predicted abundance differed significantly from the true abundance. In this study, we present StrainPro, a novel metagenomic analysis tool which is highly accurate both at characterizing microorganisms at strain-level and estimating their relative abundances. A unique feature of StrainPro is it identifies representative sequence segments from reference genomes. We generate three simulated datasets using known strain sequences and another three simulated datasets using unknown strain sequences. We compare the performance of StrainPro with seven existing tools. The results show that StrainPro not only identifies metagenomes with high precision and recall, but it is also highly robust even when the metagenomes are not included in the reference database. Moreover, StrainPro estimates the relative abundance with high accuracy. We demonstrate that there is a strong positive linear relationship between observed and predicted abundances.


2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-418
Author(s):  
Piotr Perliński ◽  
Zbigniew J. Mudryk ◽  
Marta Zdanowicz

Abstract The abundance of bacteria inhabiting the sediment-water interface and their taxonomic composition were determined with the fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) method in a marine harbor channel in Ustka. Among bacteria inhabiting the studied layer Gammaproteobacteria (1.4 cells 108·dm−3) and Cytophaga-Flavobacterium (1.1 cells 108·dm−3) dominated. Vibrio and Pseudomonas represented only a small fraction of the total cell counts. All taxonomic groups of studied bacteria show significant positive correlation between their abundance. The total bacterial number varied from 3.3 to 23.5 cells 108·dm−3 and their biomass oscillated from 39.4 to 282.4 μg C·dm−3. This parameter differed along horizontal profiles, while there were no significant differences in the abundance of the studied taxonomic groups among the study sites of the channel in Ustka. The total number of bacteria as well as the abundance of bacterial phylogenetic groups were subject to seasonal fluctuation in the studied water basin.


2020 ◽  
Vol 98 (4) ◽  
pp. 245-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
K.J. Lefort ◽  
C.J.D. Matthews ◽  
J.W. Higdon ◽  
S.D. Petersen ◽  
K.H. Westdal ◽  
...  

The killer whale (Orcinus orca (Linnaeus, 1758)) is a widely distributed marine predator with a broad ecological niche at the species level with evidence of specialization and narrow ecological niches among populations. Their occurrence in Canadian Arctic waters is limited by sea ice and it has been suggested that climate warming, which has caused increases in the area of ice-free water and duration of the ice-free season, has led to an increased killer whale presence during the open-water period. In this review, we summarize our knowledge of Canadian Arctic killer whale demographics and ecology, synthesizing published and previously unpublished information in a single document. More specifically, we summarize our knowledge of killer whale population size and trends, distribution and seasonality (including results from recent satellite-tracking studies), feeding ecology, and threats, and identify research priorities in the Canadian Arctic. Despite increased research efforts during the past decade, our demographic and ecological knowledge remains incomplete. An improved ecological understanding is necessary for effective management of killer whales and their prey, species of ecological, economic, and cultural importance to Canadian Inuit and the marine ecosystem. This knowledge will allow us to better understand the ecological consequences of a changing Arctic climate.


1993 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 521-534 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Parkman ◽  
Markus Meili

Mercury concentrations in lacustrine macroinvertebrates were concurrently studied in eight remote Swedish forest lakes of differing dystrophy, acidity, and eutrophy. The aim was to assess the influence of ecological factors (taxon, habitat, and feeding habits), chemical factors (characterizing different types of lakes), and regional and climatic factors (Hg deposition and mean temperature) on the accumulation of Hg. Concentrations varied from <50 to >5000 ng Hg∙g dry weight−1. A large part of this high variability could be ascribed to differences in water and sediment chemistry, ecological niches, and species-specific seasonalities. Both taxonomic composition and Hg concentrations were highly dependent on the type of lake. Concentrations were highest in acidic dystrophic lakes and lowest in oligotrophic lakes. Mean Hg concentrations in the examined taxa within a lake differed 100-fold. Contrary to widely held views on biomagnification, the lowest concentrations among profundal chironomids were found in predators whereas the highest concentrations occurred in detritivores. Seasonal variations were negligible in some taxa but considerable in others and appeared in some taxa to be related to the life cycle. We conclude that Hg accumulation in macroinvertebrates is largely determined by feeding behaviour and food quality.


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