Abstract
The marine waters around the South Shetland Islands are paramount in the primary production of this Antarctic ecosystem. With the increasing effects of climate change and the annual retreat of the ice shelf, the importance of macroalgae and their diatom epiphytes in primary production also increases. The relationships and interactions between these organisms have scarcely been studied in Antarctica, and even less in the volcanic ecosystem of Deception Island, which can be seen as a natural proxy of climate change in Antarctica because of its vulcanism, and the open marine system of Livingston Island. In this study we investigated the composition of the diatom communities in the context of their macroalgal hosts and different environmental factors. We used a non-acidic method for diatom digestion, followed by slidescanning and diatom identification by manual annotation through a web-browser-based image annotation platform. Epiphytic diatom species richness was higher on Deception Island as a whole, whereas individual macroalgal specimens harboured richer diatom assemblages on Livingston Island. We hypothesize this a possible result of a higher diversity of ecological niches in the unique volcanic environment of Deception Island. Overall, our study revealed higher species richness and diversity than previous studies of macroalgae-inhabiting diatoms in Antarctica, which could however be the result of the different preparation methodologies used in the different studies, rather than an indication of a higher species richness on Deception Island and Livingston Island than other Antarctic localities.
Highlights
On Antarctic coasts, marine macro- and microalgae in ice and benthos are the main primary producers [1]
The most frequent and predominant species of diatoms found in association with macroalgae (Fig 2) were generalist diatoms such as Pseudogomphonema kamtschaticum (Grunow) Medlin or as yet undescribed species as Navicula cf. perminuta Grunow and Pseudogomphonema sp. 1
We recorded 19 diatom species not previously reported from these islands (S1 Table)
Summary
On Antarctic coasts, marine macro- and microalgae in ice and benthos are the main primary producers [1]. Macroalgae cannot be interpreted either as synonymous with or part of plants in the systematic sense, these macroalgae-inhabiting diatom assemblages are usually referred to as “epiphytic” in the literature [2,3,4] This association provides a basis for complex ecological interactions between diatoms and macroalgal hosts, which are only partially understood [5]. Diatom communities collected from diverse algal hosts belonging to different classes from two islands of the South Shetland archipelago, Deception (DI) and Livingston Islands (LI), were investigated These islands differ strongly in their geology and geomorphology: DI is an active volcano, with comparatively young coastal ecosystems that undergo thermal disturbance due to volcanic activities on an irregular basis [17]. Limited sampling in this distant region affects our study and limits the causal interpretability of statistical comparisons, just as it does for similar investigations in general, we attempt to disentangle the correlative contribution of these factors to community differences, while substantially extending our diatom floristic knowledge of the Antarctic region
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