The Paradox of the Plankton

By H. Lee, Sung-Gi Moon, M. Huh. 2015

242 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Hutchinson (1961) proposed that the large number of species in most plankton communities is remarkable in review of the competitive exclusion principle, which suggests that in homogeneous, well-mixed environments species that compete for the same resources cannot coexist. The principle of competitive exclusion would lead us to conclude that only a few species could coexist in such circumstances. Nevertheless, numerous competing species in most natural habitats are able to coexist, while generally only few resources (niches) limit these communities. It is coined “the paradox of plankton” by Hutchinson. We reviewed some literature of the proposed solutions and give a brief overview of the mechanisms proposed so far. The proposed mechanisms that we discuss mainly include spatial and temporal heterogeneity in physical and biological environment, externally imposed or self-generated spatial segregation, horizontal mesoscale turbulence of ocean characterized by coherent vortices, oscillation and chaos generated by several internal and external causes, stable coexistence and compensatory dynamic under fluctuating temperature in resource competition, and finally the role of toxin-producing phytoplankton in maintaining the coexistence and biodiversity of the overall plankton populations. Especially we sited Roy and Chattopadhyay ’s reviews and their toxin-producing hypothesis by phytoplankton. This review may be some information to study plankton communities and effect to put the solutions to the paradox that have been proposed over the years into perspective.

Subfields: Environmental Chemistry, Genetics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ea70b3c98dc0eba58ca39ec9abaa23f026c8a92

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Citations in the corpus

Genetic diversity and evolution in eukaryotic phytoplankton: revelations from population genetic studies (2017, background): “While the paradox of the plankton (Hutchinson, 1961) at the interspecific level is already difficult to explain, it is even more so for genotypes of the same species.”
The Ecological Niche: History and Recent Controversies (2015, background): “According to them, this call for an explanation in terms of high dimensionality echoes the seminal papers by Gleason ( 1926 ) and Hutchinson ( 1961 ) on the question of coexistence (Clark et al. 2007 : 656; Clark 2009 : 13).”
Maximal feeding with active prey-switching: A kill-the-winner functional response and its effect on global diversity and biogeography (2014, unknown): “Multi-species ecosystem models can overcome the competitive exclusion principle (Hardin, 1960; Hutchinson, 1961; Armstrong and McGehee, 1980) by including some form of active switching (Adjou et al.”
Next-generation dynamic global vegetation models: learning from community ecology. (2013, background): “However, coexistence theory still struggles to explain the paradox of high diversity (Hutchinson, 1961), an issue that Clark, in a series of studies, suggests can be resolved by considering individual-level variation and tradeoffs in a highdimensional trait space (Clark et al., 2004, 2010).”
Ecology and exploration of the rare biosphere (2015, background): “This hypothesis also provides at least a partial explanation for the ‘paradox of the plank ton’, which refers to the fact that plankton diversity is higher than expected given the comparatively uncom plicated resource limitations observed in aquatic envi ronments 57 .”