State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Coastal Ecosystem, National Marine Environmental Monitoring Center, Dalian, 116023, China.
State Environmental Protection Key Laboratory of Coastal Ecosystem, National Marine Environmental Monitoring Center, Dalian, 116023, China.
Environ Pollut. 2021 Sep 15;285:117256. doi: 10.1016/j.envpol.2021.117256. Epub 2021 Apr 29.
Understanding the underlying mechanisms of community assembly is a major challenge in microbial ecology, particularly in communities composed of diverse organisms with different ecological characteristics. However, very little is known about the effects of marine compartments in shaping marine planktonic communities; primarily, how they are related to organism types and environmental variables. In this study, we used multiple statistical methods to explore the mechanisms driving phytoplankton and zooplankton metacommunity dynamics at the regional scale in the Bohai Sea, China. Clear geographic patterns were observed in both phytoplankton and zooplankton communities. Zooplankton showed a stronger distance-decay of similarity than phytoplankton, which had greater community differences between locations with further distances. Our analyses indicated that the zooplankton communities were primarily governed by species sorting versus dispersal limitation than the phytoplankton communities. Furthermore, we detected that zooplankton exhibited wider habitat niche breadths and dispersal abilities than phytoplankton. Our findings also showed that environmental pollution affected high trophic organisms via food webs; the presence of heavy metals in the Bohai Sea altered the abundance of some phytoplankton, and thus modified the zooplankton that feed on them.
理解群落组装的潜在机制是微生物生态学的主要挑战，特别是在由具有不同生态特征的多种生物组成的群落中。然而，人们对海洋隔室如何塑造海洋浮游生物群落知之甚少；主要是，它们与生物类型和环境变量有何关系。在这项研究中，我们使用多种统计方法来探索中国渤海浮游植物和浮游动物后生动物群落动态的驱动机制。在浮游植物和浮游动物群落中都观察到了明显的地理模式。浮游动物的相似性距离衰减比浮游植物强，距离较远的地点之间的群落差异更大。我们的分析表明，浮游动物群落主要受物种分选而非扩散限制控制，而浮游植物群落则相反。此外，我们发现浮游动物比浮游植物具有更宽的栖息地生态位宽度和扩散能力。我们的研究结果还表明，环境污染通过食物网影响高营养级生物；渤海重金属的存在改变了一些浮游植物的丰度，从而改变了以它们为食的浮游动物。
