Iron limits the cell division rate of Prochlorococcus in the eastern equatorial Pacific

Abstract

Prochlorococcus, a small unicellular cyanobacterium, is an important member of the phytoplankton community in the eastern equatorial Pacific. When these waters were enriched with iron during IronEx II, the chlorophyll per cell and cell size of Prochlorococcus increased, implying that they were iron limited. The extent of this limitation was unclear, however, and the number of Prochlorococcus remained constant. To examine whether cell division rates were stimulated significantly by iron, we used a cell cycle analysis approach to measure them in and out of the Fe-enriched patch and in Fe-enriched bottles. The cell division rate increased from 0.6 to 1.1 d Ϫ1 over 6 d of exposure to the elevated iron concentrations in the patch. Cells incubated in bottles with additional iron had rates of 1.4 d Ϫ1 or two doublings per day. Prochlorococcus mortality rates, measured independently, nearly doubled after the addition of iron. This matched the increase in the cell division rate and maintained a relatively constant population size. Thus the cell division rates of even the smallest phytoplankton in the equatorial Pacific are significantly iron limited, but biomass is constrained by both iron limitation and microzooplankton grazing. The differential response of individual phytoplankton groups to the addition of iron during IronEx II was at least partially a result of differential mortality rates over the time course of the experiment. How the community would respond to sustained fertilization, however, is not obvious.Nitrate and phosphate concentrations are persistently high in the euphotic zone of the equatorial Pacific, and phytoplankton biomass and productivity are lower than expected based on nutrient availability (Cullen 1991;Frost and Franzen 1992). The phytoplankton community is dominated by small picoplankton (Chavez 1989), which have a large surface area to volume ratio and are less likely to be diffusion limited by either nutrients or trace metals than larger cells (Morel et al. 1991a). Measured cell division rates are often 0.5 d Ϫ1 or higher, both for the phytoplankton community as a whole (Barber and Chavez 1991;Chavez et al. 1991;Cullen 1991;Cullen et al. 1992;Landry et al. 1995;Verity et al. 1996;Latasa et al. 1997;Lindley and Barber 1998) and for the small cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus (DuRand 1995;Landry et al. 1995;Vaulot et al. 1995;Binder et al. 1996;Latasa et al. 1997;Liu et al. 1997; Vaulot and Dom-1 Corresponding author (chisholm@mit.edu). AcknowledgementsWe thank the captain and crew of the RV Melville, as well as Kenneth Coale and the Moss Landing IronEx group, for making the experiment possible. We also thank R. Michael Gordon for iron concentration measurements, and Richard Barber, William Cochlan, Michael R. Landry, and Makoto Saito for sharing unpublished data. Comments by J. Cullen, P. Falkowski, and an anonymous reviewer helped improve the manuscript.

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