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Contact: Lisa Horton tel: +44 (0)1603 592764 email: [email protected]
Communication Office
University of East Anglia
Norwich NR4 7TJ
United Kingdom
Web: www.uea.ac.uk/comm
EMBARGO: 00.01 BST (London Time) FRIDAY, JULY 19, 2013
First global atlas of marine plankton reveals remarkable underwater world
Under the microscope, they look like they could be from another planet. But near infinite
numbers of microscopic organisms inhabit the depths of our oceans.
Now researchers from the University of East Anglia have helped to compile the first ever
global atlas of marine plankton - published today in a special issue of the journal Earth
System Science Data.
They are part of an international team who have identified where, when and how much
oceanic plankton can be found around the globe – ranging in size from bacteria to jellyfish.
Oceans cover 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface and are on average 4 km deep. But until
now, little was known about the composition of this enormous ecosystem.
The atlas, known as MAREDAT, will help researchers better understand marine biodiversity
for conservation and monitoring. The data will also have wide-ranging applications across
ocean and climate science – such as helping scientists create computer models to predict
the impact of climate change and ocean acidification.
Dr Erik Buitenhuis from UEA’s school of Environmental Studies said: “The ocean ecosystem
is completely dominated by small organisms. There are virtually no plants in the ocean and
the base of the food chain is formed by algae that are between one thousandth and one fifth
of a millimetre in size. They are far too small to see with the human eye, but they look
amazing under the microscope.
“They’re very important too. The marine ecosystem provides many services to humankind,
including creating enough oxygen for every other breath we take.
“They also play an important role in the ocean’s carbon cycle by removing carbon dioxide
from the atmosphere during photosynthesis and storing it deep under the sea – isolated from
the atmosphere for centuries. So this new data is extremely valuable to help us predict
climate change and its associated consequences.
“As well as being vital to climate control, plankton is also the base of the food chain for
fisheries so it is incredibly important for food security.
“One of the most interesting things that we found is that there is as much zooplankton
(animals and other heterotrophs) as phytoplankton (photosynthetic/plant-like organisms).
This is really astonishing, given that on land the ratio between plant and animal biomass is
around 500:1,” he added.
The first edition of the MAREDAT global plankton atlas took three years to compile and
combines information from half a million data points.
It is the result of a collaboration between scientists at UEA and ETH Zurich, along with the
University of Manchester, Université d’Angers and CNRS, Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution, and the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“This was difficult work and only feasible in collaboration with a range of experts,” said Meike
Vogt from the Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics at ETH Zurich, who cocoordinated the project.
“The conversion of abundance data to biomass requires an understanding of the differences
in cell and organism size, life stages, and volume to carbon ratios among different species of
the same functional group, parameters that are poorly quantified for many plankton taxa.”
The authors hope that the new MAREDAT atlas will serve as a starting place to expand the
atlas and fill missing regions that are currently under-sampled, such as the South Pacific and
parts of the Southern Ocean. It is the first step towards a comprehensive inventory of the
marine biota based on counts of individual cells or organisms.
The MAREDAT global atlas is published as a special edition of the journal Earth System
Science Data.
Attachment: Figures showing the atlas in the surface ocean and the types of organisms in
the atlas.
ENDS
EDITOR’S NOTES
1/ For more information, or to arrange an interview with Dr Erik Buitenhuis, please contact
Lisa Horton in the UEA press office by emailing [email protected] or call +44 (0)1603
592764.
2/ The University of East Anglia (UEA) was founded in 1963 and this year celebrates its 50th
anniversary. It has played a significant role in advancing human understanding and in 2012
the Times Higher Education ranked UEA as one of the 10 best universities in the world
under 50 years of age. The university has graduated more than 100,000 students, attracted
to Norwich Research Park some of Britain’s key research institutes and a major University
Hospital, and made a powerful cultural, social and economic impact on the region.
www.uea.ac.uk/50years
3/ UEA’s school of Environmental Sciences is one of the longest established, largest and
most fully developed of its kind in Europe. In the last Research Assessment Exercise, 95 per
cent of the school’s activity was classified as internationally excellent or world leading, and it
was ranked 3rd in the Guardian League Table 2013. It was ranked joint second in the country
for teaching in the 2012 National Student Survey. www.uea.ac.uk/env
Figure 1. Average PFT (plankton functional type) biomass [µg C l-1] in the top 200 m. (Pico)
Picophytoplankton, (Diaz) diazotrophs, (Cocco) coccolithophores, (Phae) Phaeocystis, (Diat)
diatoms, (Chl) HPLC chlorophyll * PlankTOM5.3 C: Chl ratio, (Bac) picoheterotrophs,
(Micro) microzooplankton, (Fora) foraminifers, (Meso) mesozooplankton, (Pter) pteropods,
(Macro) macrozooplankton.
Figure 2. Example pictures of the PFTs in Figure 1. All pictures are creative commons. Left,
from top to bottom: Prochlorococcus marinus (W.K.W. Li & F.Partensky), Trichodesmium
sp. (Karine Leblanc), Coccolithus pelagicus (Richard Lampitt, Jeremy Young), Phaeocystis
globosa (Peter Countway), Thalassiosira gravida (Katie Miller) , vertical net sampling (Ralf
Schiebel) Right, from top to bottom: Joostella marina (Manfred Rohde), Ceratocorys horrida
(Maria Faust), Beella digitata (Ralf Schiebel), Calanoida sp. (Uwe Kils), Clione limacina
(Nina Bednarsek, Bertrand Leze), Aurelia labiata (Tiergarten Schönbrunn)