저수온기 동해연안의 식물플랑크톤 크기에 따른 군집구조

Abstract

In order to understand the phytoplankton community structure based on their cell size duringlow water temperature periods, we studied 10 stations in the East Sea, Korea on March, 2012. The minimum standing crops of total phytoplankton were 3.4×106 cells L-1 at the station 5. The maximum values were 7.6×106 cells L-1 at the station 8, which is two times the amount of the minimum. The carbon mass at the station 4 (6.3×108 pg L-1) was more than forty times higher compared with station 5 (0.08×108 pg L-1). From these results, we found a significant difference between standing crops and carbon mass which might have caused due to their differences in community structure and cell size. Therefore, we considered the types of plankton biomass to estimate the primary product in the specific location and/or time. The phytoplankton communities were classified in 3 types: microplankton (¤20 μm), nanoplankton (⁄20 μm) and picoplankton (⁄2 μm). In the case of picoplankton, various morphological types were observed during the study period. These various picoplankton species were further classified as S (spherical), SF (spherical & flagella), O (oval), OF (oval & flagella) or R (rod) type, and we analyzed their community structure based on these categories. The picoplankton was found to be the most dominant type at 8 stations and S type as the most popular. The picoplankton seems to be the significant organism in the marine ecology during low water temperature periods in the coastal waters of East Sea. Therefore, picoplankton with scientific surveys can be considered as the database for their identification. In conclusion, we suggest that cell size of the phytoplankton would be the best criteria to accurately analyze their community structure and to reveal groups having more ecological influence.