Abstract
As photosynthetic producers, phytoplankton form the foundation of aquaticfood webs. Understanding the relationships among photosynthetic traits inphytoplankton is essential to revealing how diversification of these traitsallows phytoplankton to harvest energy from different light environments. Weinvestigated whether the diversification of 15 species of cryptophytes, a phy-lum of phytoplankton with diverse light-capturing pigments, showed evidenceof trade-offs among photosynthetic performance traits as predicted by the gleaner-opportunist resource exploitation framework. We constructed photo-synthesis versus irradiance (P–E) curves and rapid light curves (RLCs) to estimate parameters characterizing photosynthetic performance and electrontransport rate. We inferred the evolutionary relationships among the 15 specieswith ultraconserved genomic elements and used a phylogenetically controlled approach to test for trade-offs. Contrary to our prediction, we observed a positive correlation between maximum photosynthetic rate, Pmax , and P-E α, anindicator of a species' sensitivity to increases in light intensity when light is a scarce resource. This result could not be explained by electron transfer traits, which were uncorrelated with photosynthetic rate. Together, our results suggest that ecological diversification of light exploitation in cryptophytes hasescaped the constraints of a gleaner–opportunist trade-off. Photosynthetictrade-offs may be context- or scale-dependent, thereby only emerging when investigated in situations different from the one used here.
Description
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providedthe original work is properly cited.© 2024 The Author(s). Ecosphere published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of The Ecological Society of America.
Publisher
Wiley
Date of publication
2-27-2024
Language
english
Persistent identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/10950/4986
Document Type
Article
Recommended Citation
Swanson, Jake A.; Greenwold, Matthew J.; Richardson, Tammi L.; and Dudycha, Jeffry L., "A test of the gleaner–opportunist trade-off among photosynthetic traits in cryptophyte algae" (2024). Biology Faculty Publications and Presentations. Paper 41.
http://hdl.handle.net/10950/4986