Diatoms structure the plankton community based on selective segregation in the world’s ocean

Abstract

Diatoms are a major component of phytoplankton, believed to be responsible for around 20% of the annual primary production on Earth. As abundant and ubiquitous organisms, they are known to establish biotic interactions with many other members of the plankton. Through analysis of co-occurrence networks derived from the Tara Oceans expedition that take into account the importance of both biotic and abiotic factors in shaping the spatial distributions of species, we show that only 13% of diatom pairwise associations are driven by environmental conditions, whereas the vast majority are independent of abiotic factors. In contrast to most other plankton groups, at a global scale diatoms display a much higher proportion of negative correlations with other organisms, particularly towards potential predators and parasites, suggesting that their biogeography is constrained by top down pressure. Genus level analyses indicate that abundant diatoms are not necessarily the most connected, and that species-specific abundance distribution patterns lead to negative associations with other organisms. In order to move forward in the biological interpretation of co-occurrence networks, an open access extensive literature survey of diatom biotic interactions was compiled, of which 18.5% were recovered in the computed network. This result reveals the extent of what likely remains to be discovered in the field of planktonic biotic interactions, even for one of the best known organismal groups.\n\nImportanceDiatoms are key phytoplankton in the modern ocean involved in numerous biotic interactions, ranging from symbiosis to predation and viral infection, which have considerable effects on global biogeochemical cycles. However, despite recent large-scale studies of plankton, we are still lacking a comprehensive picture of the diversity of diatom biotic interactions in the marine microbial community. Through the ecological interpretation of both inferred microbial association networks and available knowledge on diatom interactions compiled in an open access database, we propose an eco-systems level understanding of diatom interactions in the ocean.