Physiological responses of Oxyrrhis marina to a diet of virally infected Emiliania huxleyi
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Marine Biology, Microbiology, Virology, Biological Oceanography
- Keywords
- phytoplankton, Emiliania huxleyi, carbon, virus, grazing, dinoflagellate, food web, zooplankton, growth, Oxyrrhis marina, coccolithophore
- Copyright
- © 2018 Goode et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Physiological responses of Oxyrrhis marina to a diet of virally infected Emiliania huxleyi. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26851v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26851v1
Abstract
The coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi forms some of the largest phytoplankton blooms in the ocean. The rapid demise of these blooms has been linked to viral infections. E. huxleyi abundance, distribution, and nutritional status make them an important food source for the heterotrophic protists which are classified as microzooplankton in marine food webs. In this study we investigated the fate of E. huxleyi (CCMP 374) infected with virus strain EhV-86 in a simple predator-prey interaction. The ingestion rates of Oxyrrhis marina were significantly lower (between 26.9 and 50.4%) when fed virus-infected E. huxleyi cells compared to non-infected cells. Despite the lower ingestion rates, O. marina showed significantly higher growth rates (between 30 and 91.3%) when fed infected E. huxleyi cells, suggesting higher nutritional value and/or greater assimilation of infected E. huxleyi cells. No significant differences were found in O. marina cell volumes or fatty acids profiles. These results show that virally infected E. huxleyi support higher growth rates of single celled heterotrophs and in addition to the “viral shunt” hypothesis, viral infections may also divert more carbon to mesozooplankton grazers.
Author Comment
This is a submission to PeerJ for review.