The threshold feeding response of microzooplankton within Pacific high-nitrate low-chlorophyll ecosystem models under steady and variable iron input

The equatorial Pacific is an HNLC (High-Nitrate Low-Chlorophyll) region. Modeling and in-situ process studies have confirmed the importance of microzooplankton grazing in this ecosystem. Unfortunately, both the parameters and functions representing microzooplankton grazing within current ecosystem models are poorly constrained. We used a simple 4-component food web model to test the assumption that a lower grazing threshold, which is common in many models, is necessary to achieve the HNLC condition. Without the grazing threshold, the model did not reproduce the HNLC condition. However, by raising the half-saturation constant within the microzooplankton functional response with no threshold, it was possible to reproduce the critical dynamics of the HNLC condition under both steady and moderate seasonal variability in nutrient input. It was also possible to reproduce the HNLC system using a sigmoidal functional response for the microzooplankton, with results somewhere between the other two forms of the model, although this version had the highest sensitivity to changes in its parameters. The three models predicted similar phytoplankton biomass and primary productivity under steady nutrient input, but diverge in these metrics as the amplitude of nutrient input variability increases. These three functional responses also imply certain important differences in the microzooplankton community. Whereas the threshold model had the least sensitivity to parameter choice, the high half-saturation constant, no-threshold model may actually be a better approximation when modeling a community of grazers. Ecosystem models that predict carbon production and export in HNLC regions can be very sensitive to assumptions concerning microzooplankton grazing; future studies need to concentrate on the functional responses of microzooplankton before these models can be used for predicting fluxes in times or regions where forcing is beyond that used to constrain the original model.

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