Sea changes

摘要

It was recently reported~8 that at low concen-trations of CO_2 coccolithophores seem to divert ‘pumped’ bicarbonate-sea water bicarbonate that has been actively transported into cells-away from calcification and towards photosynthetic production of organic carbon. Bolton and Stoll provide independent confirmation of this shift in carbon metabolism for a variety of coccolithophore species from the modern ocean and from the geological past, and they show that the expression of this shift depends on cell size. So what does this tell us about ocean ecology?