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. 2025 Feb 3;8(1):162.
doi: 10.1038/s42003-024-07380-2.

Warming alters plankton body-size distributions in a large field experiment

Affiliations

Warming alters plankton body-size distributions in a large field experiment

Dania Albini et al. Commun Biol. .

Abstract

The threat of climate change has renewed interest in the responses of communities and ecosystems to warming, with changes in size spectra expected to signify fundamental shifts in the structure and dynamics of these multispecies systems. While substantial empirical evidence has accumulated in recent years on such changes, we still lack general insights due to a limited coverage of warming scenarios that span spatial and temporal scales of relevance to natural systems. We addressed this gap by conducting an extensive freshwater mesocosm experiment across 36 large field mesocosms exposed to intergenerational warming treatments of up to +8 °C above ambient levels. We found a nonlinear decrease in the overall mean body size of zooplankton with warming, with a 57% reduction at +8 °C. This pattern was broadly consistent over two tested seasons and major taxonomic groups. We also detected some breakpoints in the community-level size-temperature relationship, indicating that the system's response shifts noticeably above a certain level of warming. These results underscore the need to capture intergenerational responses to large gradients in warming at appropriate scales in time and space in order to better understand the effects of warming on natural communities and ecosystems.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: Eoin J. O’Gorman is an Editorial Board Member for Communications Biology, but was not involved in the editorial review of, nor the decision to publish this article.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1. Experimental design.
On the left, schematic representation of the mesocosms heated with a gradient of temperatures (from +1 to + 8 °C above ambient). Zooplankton samples were collected with a plankton net in Spring and Autumn 2019 and analysed with a FlowCam (High- throughput flow cytometry coupled with machine learning), if smaller than 1 mm, and with a microscope if bigger than 1 mm, to obtain body measurements and abundance data.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2. Effect of warming on community body size and biomass.
a Effect of warming on average community Body size (y-axes, transformed in log10) of all measured individuals in each mesocosm (n mesocosms = 72) for each temperature (x-axes, F1,70 = 25.037, Adjusted R2 = 0.253, p < 0.05). Linear model is fitted showing the confidence intervals. b Effect of warming on the average community Biomass (y-axes, transformed in log10) across the mesocosms (n mesocosms = 72) for each temperature (x-axes, F1,63.6 = 1.1290, Adjusted R2 = −0.003, p = 0.2920).
Fig. 3
Fig. 3. PCA Biplots of Taxa Abundance and Body Size with Temperature.
a The biplot displays the results of principal component analysis (PCA) conducted on the taxa abundance per mesocosm averaged over the sampling times. Each point represents an individual mesocosm, and its position in the plot reflects its projection onto the first two principal components (PC1, x-axes and PC2, y-axes). The first axis explains 22.9% of the variance, while the second 20.7%. The length and direction of the arrows represent the contribution and direction of the taxa abundance to the principal components (PC1 and PC2). b The biplot displays the results of principal component analysis (PCA) conducted on the individual body size averaged over the sampling times. Each point represents an individual mesocosm, and its position in the plot reflects its projection onto the first two principal components (PC1, x-axes and PC2, y-axes). The first axis explains 32.4% of the variance, while the second 20.1%. The length and direction of the arrows represent the contribution to the principal components (PC1 and PC2) and direction of the abundance of individuals with body size which fell in each bin (from 1 -larger individuals, to 7- smaller individuals). For both PCAs, temperature across samples is overlayed on the graphic, represented by a brown arrow. The colour scale indicates deviations of temperature from ambient levels, ranging from 0 °C (dark blue – control mesocosms) to 8 °C (dark red), for each mesocosm.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4. Zooplankton Body Mass vs Warming.
a Relationships between warming (x-axes, in C) and average body mass (y axes, mean values in log10 scale, expressed in units of carbon (µg C)) in the different zooplankton taxa (total n of zooplankton = 18174 ind.). The best fitted model between segmented regression and linear model was chosen based on the AIC criterion. For each model, number of individuals and slope values are indicated for each taxon and when the segmented model was the best fit, a green triangle marks the position of the threshold points. b Slopes of the model for the different taxa, ranked from the steepest to the gentler slope. The shadow around the slope corresponds to the 95% confidence intervals.

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