Exploring the occurrence of and explanations for nighttime spikes in dissolved oxygen across coral reef environments

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1 Department of Biology, San Diego State University, San Diego, California, United States
2 Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Moss Landing, California, United States
3 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Bocas del Toro, Republic of Panama
4 Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, California, United States
5 Caribbean Research and Management of Biodiversity, Willemstad, Curacao
6 Aquatic Microbiology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands
7 Center for Microbial Oceanography, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States
8 Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, East Boothbay, Maine, United States
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.2935v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Biochemistry, Ecology, Ecosystem Science, Environmental Sciences, Marine Biology
Keywords
coral reef, oxygen budget, benthic oxygen production, tropical marine systems, nighttime oxygen production
Copyright
© 2017 Calhoun 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
Calhoun SK, Haas AF, Takeshita Y, Johnson MD, Fox MD, Kelly ELA, Mueller B, Vermeij MJA, Kelly LW, Nelson CE, Price NN, Roach TNF, Rohwer FL, Smith JE. 2017. Exploring the occurrence of and explanations for nighttime spikes in dissolved oxygen across coral reef environments. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2935v1

Abstract

Primary production due to photosynthesis results in daytime oxygen production across marine and freshwater ecosystems. However, a prevalent, globally-occurring nighttime spike in dissolved oxygen (DO) challenges our traditional assumption that oxygen production is limited to daylight hours, particularly in tropical coral reefs. When considered in the context of ecosystem oxygen budget estimates, these nocturnal spikes in DO could account for up to 24 percent of the daytime oxygen production. Here we show, 1) the widespread nature of this phenomenon, 2) the reproducibility across tropical marine ecosystems, 3) the lack of a consistent abiotic mechanism across all datasets we examined, and 4) the observation of nighttime DO spikes in vitro from incubations of coral reef benthic samples. Our study suggests that in addition to physical forcing, biological processes may be responsible for the production of oxygen at night, a finding that demands additional research.

Author Comment

This is a preprint submission to PeerJ