Paula Villa: Ocean currents promote rare species diversity in protists.
Channel: Física de la Materia. Universidad de Granada
Date: 2020-10-26

Talk given on October 9th 2020. 

- Speaker: Paula Villa. Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Biological Complexity Unit.

- Title: Ocean currents promote rare species diversity in protists.

- Abstract:  Oceans host communities of plankton composed of a huge number of rare species that, as estimated in metagenomic studies, decay as a steep power law of their abundance. We propose that the way chaotic advection of oceanic currents limit protists dispersal is a key  factor of such biodiversity pattern. We introduce a spatially explicit coalescence model able to reconstruct species ancestry and diversity in the presence of currents. Our model predicts a steep power law decay of the species abundance distribution and a steep increase of the number of observed species with sample size. Indeed, we find a significant correlation of the local finite-size Lyapunov exponents of our chaotic currents and the power law exponents of the species abundance distribution. Metagenomic studies of planktonic protist communities show excellent agreement with our results. 

- Reference: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/29/eaaz9037