Is toxin production in phytoplankton costly? How do environmental conditions affect the cost of toxin production?
We have developed a trait-based model to describe how the size of organisms and the environmental conditions interact to determine trophic strategies of unicellular plankton.
New study from the Centre for Ocean Life shows the succession of three key resource-harvesting traits: photosynthesis, phagotrophy and inorganic nutrient uptake predicting the trophic strategy of plankton throughout the seasonal succession.
In a new Ocean Life paper, we show how allelochemicals released by toxic phytoplankton helps in the coexistence of more phytoplankton species than the number of limiting resources and thus promoting biodiversity