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Marine microorganisms and global nutrient cycles

Nature volume 437, pages 349–355 (2005)Cite this article

An Erratum to this article was published on 03 November 2005

Abstract

The way that nutrients cycle through atmospheric, terrestrial, oceanic and associated biotic reservoirs can constrain rates of biological production and help structure ecosystems on land and in the sea. On a global scale, cycling of nutrients also affects the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Because of their capacity for rapid growth, marine microorganisms are a major component of global nutrient cycles. Understanding what controls their distributions and their diverse suite of nutrient transformations is a major challenge facing contemporary biological oceanographers. What is emerging is an appreciation of the previously unknown degree of complexity within the marine microbial community.

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Figure 1: Three different phytoplankton growth strategies and their resulting cellular N:P ratios.
Figure 2: The global ocean balance between N2 fixation and the loss of fixed N through anammox and denitrification.
Figure 3: A breakdown of the three types of resource co-limitation.
Figure 4: Marine N cycle, including losses of ammonium and nitrite as N2 owing to anammox.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank S. Rysgaard, T. Dalsgaard, and M. Kuypers for assistance with the anammox section of this manuscript. D. Capone, E. Carpenter, and A. Subramaniam provided valuable insight about N2 fixation. I would like to thank M. Davey and G. Tarran for providing their unpublished flow cytometry data from their North Atlantic work. Thanks also to M. Mills, G. van Dijken, A. Tagliabue, R. Labiosa, T. Reddy, S. Pabi, L. Kropuenske and B. Saenz for comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

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    Kevin R. Arrigo

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Arrigo, K. Marine microorganisms and global nutrient cycles. Nature 437, 349–355 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04159

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