Could experimental warming and acidification produce changes in the virus life cycle in the Arctic?

• Main Authors: Vaqué, Dolors, Lara, Elena, Sà, Elisabet L., Hendriks, Iris E., Holding, Johnna M., Agustí, Susana, Arrieta López de Uralde, Jesús M., Wassmann, Paul F., Duarte, Carlos M.
• Format: Still Image
• Language: unknown
• Published: Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography 2015
• Subjects: Arctic; Arctic Ocean; Svalbard; Climate change; Isfjord*; Isfjorden; Ocean acidification
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10261/136240

Aquatic Sciences Meeting, Aquatic Sciences: Global And Regional Perspectives - North Meets South, 22-27 February 2015, Granada, Spain Ocean acidification and warming are two main consequences of climate change that can directly affect organismal and ecosystem processes in marine ecosystems. This is especially true in the Arctic Ocean where temperatures are increasing 2-3 times the global rate and inherent cold temperatures and recent ice cover loss increases its vulnerability to ocean acidification. We carried out a microcosm experiment with a plankton community collected from a high Arctic Fjord (Isfjorden, Svalbard Islands) to analyze how the interaction between acidification (changes in pH, by bubbling CO2) and warming (1°C, 6°C and 10°C) could affect bacterial, protists and viral processes as bacterial production (BP), bacterial mortality by protists and viruses, and lytic vs lysogenic (LysoVP) viral production. We obtained that a 48% and a 79% of BP variability is explained by pH at 6° C and at 10°C, respectively, while at 1ºC pH also explicated a 49% variability of the percentage of bacterial removed by protists. Furthermore, pH were responsible of 86% of LysoVP and 94% of the percentage of LysoVP variability, at 10°C. However no pattern for lytic viral production and lysed bacteria were observed with pH at different temperatures. Consequently, pH together with temperature contributes to modify BP, grazing by predators, and to introduce changes in the virus cycle infection promoting LysoVP at low pH and at high temperature. This experiment provides hints to how these altered microbial processes could intervene with the carbon cycle in the Arctic Ocean Peer Reviewed