Abstract
Around one third of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions have been absorbed by the oceans, causing changes in seawater pH and carbonate chemistry. These changes have the potential to affect phytoplankton, which are critically important for marine food webs and the global carbon cycle. However, our current knowledge of how phytoplankton will respond to these changes is limited to a few laboratory and mesocosm experiments. Long-term experiments are needed to determine the vulnerability of phytoplankton to enhanced pCO2. Maintaining phytoplankton cultures in exponential growth for extended periods of time is logistically difficult and labour intensive. Here we describe a continuous culture system that greatly reduces the time required to maintain phytoplankton cultures, and minimises variation in experimental pCO2 treatments over time. This system is simple, relatively cheap, flexible, and allows long-term experiments to be performed to further our understanding of chronic responses and adaptation by phytoplankton species to future ocean acidification.
Highlights
A human-induced increase in atmospheric pCO2 is changing the carbonate chemistry of the oceans.Termed “ocean acidification”, these changes may threaten a range of marine organisms [1,2,3,4,5,6]
Minimising the deviation of the experimental CO2 concentration from the target concentration for each CO2 treatment is vital for ocean acidification experiments
Phytoplankton form the basis of marine food webs and understanding the effects of enhanced CO2 on their physiology, biochemical composition and abundance is vital to predict the effects of ocean acidification on marine ecosystems
Summary
A human-induced increase in atmospheric pCO2 is changing the carbonate chemistry of the oceans.Termed “ocean acidification”, these changes may threaten a range of marine organisms [1,2,3,4,5,6]. To better understand and predict the impact of ocean acidification on marine organisms, experimental research must simulate natural changes in ocean chemistry. A range of methods have been applied to manipulate seawater pH and CO2 concentrations in ocean acidification experiments, with different effects on the carbonate chemistry [7,8]. This has made it difficult to compare results [2,9,10] and this issue has been addressed by the publication of a number of best practice guides for ocean acidification research [11,12,13,14]. Medium- to long-term ocean acidification experiments performed over many generations are recommended to assess natural plasticity [12]
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