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Eukaryotic microbial richness increases with latitude and decreasing temperature in the Pacific Subarctic domain in late winter

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Abstract

The Bering Sea has some of the highest concentrations of inorganic nutrients of any marine system. In the Bering Sea, eukaryotic microbes interface inorganic nutrient sequestration and cycling processes that drive one of the most productive ecosystems globally. Historical surveys of eukaryotic microbial diversity in the Bering Sea have relied on microscopy and culturing-dependent analyses to assess microbial diversity patterns. In this study, we used high-throughput sequencing (Illumina MiSeq) of the 18S rRNA gene to explore general patterns of eukaryotic microbial diversity from six regions in the Bering Sea and surrounding Subarctic Pacific. The greatest richness was found in the Shelikof Strait and at the marginal ice zone. The lowest richness was found in the deep water basin south of the Aleutian Islands. Ordination analysis of our sequences revealed nearly identical community structures between our Shelikof Strait and the deep water basin sites. Operational taxonomic unit analysis revealed that water samples from the Bering Sea sites shared more OTUs with the Shelikof Strait site than with the sea ice sample, despite the existence of sea ice in the Bering Sea, reflecting known circulation patterns out of the Gulf of Alaska. Richness increased with increasing latitude and decreasing temperature, suggesting that the base of food webs is susceptible to temperature perturbations.

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Acknowledgements

This material is supported by National Science Foundation Award DGE-0801720, the Marine Ecosystem Sustainability in the Arctic and Subarctic (MESAS) IGERT #1303901. Sequence data have been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under BioProject accession 305168. The funders had no role in study design, data collection, and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

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  1. Department of Arctic and Marine Biology, UiT the Arctic University of Norway, Postboks 6050 Langnes, N-9037, Tromsø, Norway

    B. T. Hassett & R. Gradinger

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  1. B. T. Hassett
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  2. R. Gradinger
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Correspondence to B. T. Hassett.

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Electronic supplementary material

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Online Resource 1

Sampling rarefaction curves. Curves were generated after sequence vetting, subsampling (62,588) and clustering at 97% similarity (TIFF 164 kb)

Online Resource 2

Condensed taxonomy list of detected organisms in the Bering Sea and surrounding areas. Organisms classified to the taxonomic genus level are represented below. Select taxonomic clades in the Phaeophytes and fungi were represented by only sequences classifiable to Order and were included in this table. The majority of our sequences did not classify to the genus level and are not represented in this table. For example, the Prasinophytes were detected at every station, but Prasinoderma sp. is represented at only three stations (DOCX 46 kb)

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Hassett, B.T., Gradinger, R. Eukaryotic microbial richness increases with latitude and decreasing temperature in the Pacific Subarctic domain in late winter. Polar Biol 40, 2161–2169 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00300-017-2131-2

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