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Scaling of species distribution explains the vast potential marine prokaryote diversity.

  • Eguíluz VM King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Red Sea Research Center (RSRC), Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia. victor@ifisc.uib-csic.es.
  • Salazar G Department of Biology, Institute of Microbiology and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, ETH Zurich, Vladimir-Prelog-Weg 1-5/10, CH-8093, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • Fernández-Gracia J Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB), E07122, Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
  • Pearman JK King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Red Sea Research Center (RSRC), Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia.
  • Gasol JM Departament de Biologia Marina i Oceanografia, Institut de Ciències del Mar-CSIC, Pg. Marítim de la Barceloneta 37-49, 08003, Barcelona, Spain.
  • Acinas SG Departament de Biologia Marina i Oceanografia, Institut de Ciències del Mar-CSIC, Pg. Marítim de la Barceloneta 37-49, 08003, Barcelona, Spain.
  • Sunagawa S Department of Biology, Institute of Microbiology and Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, ETH Zurich, Vladimir-Prelog-Weg 1-5/10, CH-8093, Zurich, Switzerland.
  • Irigoien X AZTI - Marine Research, Herrera Kaia, Portualdea z/g, Pasaia (Gipuzkoa), 20110, Spain.
  • Duarte CM King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Red Sea Research Center (RSRC), Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia.
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  • 2019-12-12
Published in:
  • Scientific reports. - 2019
Aquatic Organisms
Biodiversity
Demography
Ecosystem
Indian Ocean
Microbiota
Models, Theoretical
Population Density
Prokaryotic Cells
Seawater
English Global ocean expeditions have provided minimum estimates of ocean's prokaryote diversity, supported by apparent asymptotes in the number of prokaryotes with sampling effort, of about 40,000 species, representing <1% of the species cataloged in the Earth Microbiome Project, despite being the largest habitat in the biosphere. Here we demonstrate that the abundance of prokaryote OTUs follows a scaling that can be represented by a power-law distribution, and as a consequence, we demonstrate, mathematically and through simulations, that the asymptote of rarefaction curves is an apparent one, which is only reached with sample sizes approaching the entire ecosystem. We experimentally confirm these findings using exhaustive repeated sampling of a prokaryote community in the Red Sea and the exploration of global assessments of prokaryote diversity in the ocean. Our findings indicate that, far from having achieved a thorough sampling of prokaryote species abundance in the ocean, global expeditions provide just a start for this quest as the richness in the global ocean is much larger than estimated.
Language
  • English
Open access status
gold
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Persistent URL
https://sonar.ch/global/documents/98965
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