Krill and salp faecal pellets contribute equally to the carbon flux at the Antarctic Peninsula
Abstract
Krill and salps are important for carbon flux in the Southern Ocean, but the extent of their contribution and the consequences of shifts in dominance from krill to salps remain unclear. We present a direct comparison of the contribution of krill and salp faecal pellets (FP) to vertical carbon flux at the Antarctic Peninsula using a combination of sediment traps, FP production, carbon content, microbial degradation, and krill and salp abundances. Salps produce 4-fold more FP carbon than krill, but the FP from both species contribute equally to the carbon flux at 300 m, accounting for 75% of total carbon. Krill FP are exported to 72% to 300 m, while 80% of salp FP are retained in the mixed layer due to fragmentation. Thus, declining krill abundances could lead to decreased carbon flux, indicating that the Antarctic Peninsula could become a less efficient carbon sink for anthropogenic CO2 in future.
Citation
Pauli , N-C , Flintrop , C M , Konrad , C , Pakhomov , E A , Swoboda , S , Koch , F , Wang , X-L , Zhang , J-C , Brierley , A S , Bernasconi , M , Meyer , B & Iversen , M H 2021 , ' Krill and salp faecal pellets contribute equally to the carbon flux at the Antarctic Peninsula ' , Nature Communications , vol. 12 , 7168 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-27436-9
Publication
Nature Communications
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2041-1723Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Description
This study was part of the project “Population shift and ecosystem response – krill vs. salps” funded by the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture (MWK) lead by B.M. M.H.I., C.M.F., C.K. and S.S. were supported by the HGF Young Investigator Group SeaPump “Seasonal and regional food web interactions with the biological pump”, VH-NG-1000. CMF was additionally supported by the AWI Strategy Fund project EcoPump. MHI was additionally supported by the DFG Research Center of Excellence “The Ocean Floor – Earth’s Uncharted Interface”: EX-2077-390741603.Collections
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