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Temperature-related changes in polar cyanobacterial mat diversity and toxin production

Nature Climate Change volume 2, pages 356–360 (2012)Cite this article

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Abstract

One of the fastest rates of recent climate warming has been reported for the Arctic and the maritime Antarctic1; for example, mean annual temperatures increased by 0.5 °C per decade over the Antarctic Peninsula during the past 50 years2. Owing to their comparatively simple and highly sensitive food webs3, polar freshwater systems, with cyanobacterial mats representing the dominant benthic primary producers4, seem well suited for monitoring environmental perturbation, including climate change5. Prolonged climate change may challenge the resilience, plasticity and adaptability and thus affect the community composition of cyanobacterial mats. We demonstrate that exposing polar mat samples to raised temperatures for six months results in a change in species predominance. Mats exposed to a constant temperature of 8 °C or 16 °C showed high cyanobacterial diversity, commensurate with an increased presence of cyanobacterial toxins. In contrast, mats held at 4 °C and 23 °C seemed low in diversity. Our data thus indicate that a temperature shift to 8–16 °C, potentially reached during summer months in polar regions at the present warming rate, could affect cyanobacterial diversity, and in some instances result in a shift to toxin-producing species or to elevated toxin concentrations by pre-existing species that could profoundly alter freshwater polar ecosystems.

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Figure 1: Community composition respective to temperature and origin of cyanobacterial mats and cultures.
Figure 2: Temperature effects on detectable species numbers (number of ARISA fragments) in cyanobacterial mat cultures.
Figure 3: Cyanobacterial species distribution in original and cultured mat samples.
Figure 4: Microcystin concentrations detected in original and cultured cyanobacterial mat samples.

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Acknowledgements

For financial support of the Antarctic expedition we would like to acknowledge the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)-funded project DI698/18-1 Dietrich, as well as the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through project LIMNOPOLAR (POL2006–06635 and CGL2005-06549-C02-01/ANT to A.Q., as well as CGL2005-06549-C02-02/ANT to A.C., the last of these co-financed by European FEDER funds). We thank the TOTAL Foundation for funding the expedition to Baffin Island and within this context O. Dargent, Nice, France, and P. van West, University of Aberdeen, UK, for collecting and photographing Arctic specimens on Baffin Island. We would also like to thank the Carl Zeiss Stiftung and the Excellence Initiative of the University of Konstanz, Germany, for funding the PhD project of J.K. and APECS for their support to conference contributions. Furthermore, we acknowledge the support of the European Community research infrastructure action under the FP7 ‘capacities’ specific programme ASSEMBLE No.227788. For technical support and new ideas we are very grateful to D. Schleheck, H. Bastek and K. Leinweber from the University of Konstanz, Germany, and A. Jungblut from the Natural History Museum, London, UK.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Human and Environmental Toxicology, University of Konstanz, 78464 Konstanz, Germany

    Julia Kleinteich & Daniel R. Dietrich

  2. Cawthron Institute, Nelson 7042, New Zealand

    Susanna A. Wood

  3. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Waikato, Hamilton 2001, New Zealand

    Susanna A. Wood

  4. Scottish Association for Marine Science, Scottish Marine Institute, Oban PA37 1QA, UK

    Frithjof C. Küpper

  5. Oceanlab, University of Aberdeen, Main Street, Newburgh AB41 6AA, UK

    Frithjof C. Küpper

  6. Cavanilles Institute for Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, University of Valencia, E-46100, Burjassot, València, Spain

    Antonio Camacho

  7. Department of Biology, Autonomous University of Madrid, E-28049 Madrid, Spain

    Antonio Quesada

  8. Applied Bioinformatics, University of Konstanz, 78464 Konstanz, Germany

    Tancred Frickey

Authors
  1. Julia Kleinteich
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  4. Antonio Camacho
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  7. Daniel R. Dietrich
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Contributions

J.K. planned and carried out all presented experiments, and prepared the data, figures and the manuscript. S.A.W. assisted in experimental procedures and analysed the ARISA samples. F.C.K. organized and collected the samples of the Arctic expedition. A.Q. and A.C. were in charge of the organization and collected the samples during the Antarctic expedition. T.F. carried out the bioinformatic analysis of sequence data. D.R.D. was the project coordinator, supervisor of experiments, planned and carried out some experiments and prepared the manuscript. All authors contributed equally to critically reviewing the manuscript and discussing experiments and results.

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Correspondence to Daniel R. Dietrich.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Kleinteich, J., Wood, S., Küpper, F. et al. Temperature-related changes in polar cyanobacterial mat diversity and toxin production. Nature Clim Change 2, 356–360 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1418

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