Found in lakes and rivers around the world, single-celled creatures like this one Bursaria Paramecium It can eat and photosynthesize. Microbes like these play a dual role in climate change, releasing or absorbing carbon dioxide—a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that is a major driver of warming—depending on whether they adopt animal-like or plant-like lifestyles. Credit: Daniel J Wiczynski, Duke University
Rising heat levels could push marine plankton and other single-celled organisms toward carbon sinks, which could exacerbate global warming. However, recent studies have shown that it may be possible to identify early warning signs before these organisms reach that tipping point.
A group of scientists conducting research on a widespread, but often overlooked class of microbes, have discovered climate feedbacks that could increase global warming. However, this finding has an upside: It can also be an early warning signal.
Using computer simulations, researchers from Duke University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, have shown that most global ocean plankton, along with many single-celled organisms that inhabit lakes, peatlands, and other ecosystems, may be reaching a tipping point. point. Here, instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, they begin to do the opposite. These changes are a result of the way your metabolism responds to heating.
Because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, this in turn can raise temperatures—a positive feedback loop that can cause rapid changes, where a little warming goes a long way.
But by carefully monitoring their abundance, we may be able to anticipate a tipping point before it gets here, the researchers report in a study published June 1 in the journal Nature. functional ecology.
In the new study, the researchers focused on a group of microorganisms called mixotrophs, so named because they combine two metabolic modes: They can photosynthesize like plants or hunt for food like animals, depending on conditions.
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Most of the plankton in the ocean — things like diatoms, dinoflagellates — are mixotrophs. They’re also common in lakes, peatlands, in damp soils, and beneath fallen leaves.
“If you were to go to the nearest pond or lake and scoop a cup of water and put it under a microscope, you’d likely find thousands or even millions of mixotrophic microbes swimming around,” Wieczynski said.
“Because mixotrophs can both capture and emit carbon dioxide, they’re like ‘switches’ that could either help reduce climate change or make it worse,” said co-author Holly Moeller, an assistant professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
To understand how these impacts might scale up, the researchers developed a mathematical model to predict how mixotrophs might shift between different modes of metabolism as the climate continues to warm.
The researchers ran their models using a 4-degree span of temperatures, from 19 to 23 degrees
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The analysis showed that the warmer it gets, the more mixotrophs rely on eating food rather than making their own via photosynthesis. As they do, they shift the balance between carbon in and carbon out.
The models suggest that, eventually, we could see these microbes reach a tipping point — a threshold beyond which they suddenly flip from carbon sink to carbon source, having a net warming effect instead of a cooling one.
This tipping point is hard to undo. Once they cross that threshold, it would take significant cooling — more than one degree Celsius — to restore their cooling effects, the findings suggest.
But it’s not all bad news, the researchers said. Their results also suggest that it may be possible to spot these shifts in advance, if we watch out for changes in mixotroph abundance over time.
“Right before a tipping point, their abundances suddenly start to fluctuate wildly,” Wieczynski said. “If you went out in nature and you saw a sudden change from relatively steady abundances to rapid fluctuations, you would know it’s coming.”
Whether the early warning signal is detectable, however, may depend on another key factor revealed by the study: nutrient pollution.
Discharges from wastewater treatment facilities and runoff from farms and lawns laced with chemical fertilizers and animal waste can send nutrients like nitrate and phosphate into lakes and streams and coastal waters.
When Wieczynski and his colleagues included higher amounts of such nutrients in their models, they found that the range of temperatures over which the telltale fluctuations occur starts to shrink until eventually the signal disappears and the tipping point arrives with no apparent warning.
The predictions of the model still need to be verified with real-world observations, but they “highlight the value of investing in early detection,” Moeller said.
“Tipping points can be short-lived, and thus hard to catch,” Gibert said. “This paper provides us with a search image, something to look out for, and makes those tipping points — as fleeting as they may be — more likely to be found.”
Reference: “Mixotrophic microbes create carbon tipping points under warming” by Daniel J. Wieczynski, Holly V. Moeller and Jean P. Gibert, 31 May 2023, Functional Ecology.
DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.14350
The study was funded by the Simons Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy.
2023-06-04 09:36:51
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