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Difference of planktonic ciliate communities of the tropical West Pacific, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean

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Abstract

Ciliates are important components in planktonic food webs, but our understanding of their community structures in different oceanic water masses is limited. We report pelagic ciliate community characteristics in three seas: the tropical West Pacific, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean. Planktonic ciliate abundance had “bimodal-peak”, “surface-peak” and “DCM (deep chlorophyll a maximum layer)-peak” vertical distribution patterns in the tropical West Pacific, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, respectively. The abundance proportion of tintinnid to total ciliate in the Bering Sea (42.6%) was higher than both the tropical West Pacific (7.8%) and the Arctic Ocean (2.0%). The abundance proportion of small aloricate ciliates (10–20 µm size-fraction) in the tropical West Pacific was highest in these three seas. The Arctic Ocean had higher abundance proportion of tintinnids in larger LOD (lorica oral diameter) size-class. Proportion of redundant species increased from the Arctic Ocean to the tropical West Pacific. Our result provided useful data to further understand ecology roles of planktonic ciliates in different marine habitats.

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Correspondence to Wuchang Zhang or Yuan Zhao.

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Foundation item: The National Natural Science Foundation of China under contract No. 41706192; the Science & Technology Basic Resources Investigation Program of China under contract No. 2017FY100803; the National Natural Science Foundation of China-Shandong Joint Fund for Marine Science Research Centers under contract No. U1606404; the CNRS-NSFC Joint Research Projects Program under contract No. NSFC 41711530149; the 2017–2019 Sino-French Cai Yuanpei Programme; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under contract No. 41706217.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the great efforts of the crew of R/V Kexue during the cruise in the tropical West Pacific, and R/V Xuelong during the cruise in the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean, respectively. We thank Steve O’Shea of the Edanz Group (www.edanzediting.com/ac) for editing a draft of this manuscript.

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Wang, C., Li, H., Xu, Z. et al. Difference of planktonic ciliate communities of the tropical West Pacific, the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean. Acta Oceanol. Sin. 39, 9–17 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13131-020-1541-0

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