Sanders Robert W.

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Sanders
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Robert W.
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  • Article
    Mixotrophy : a widespread and important ecological strategy for planktonic and sea-ice nanoflagellates in the Ross Sea, Antarctica
    (Inter-Research, 2009-03-04) Moorthi, Stefanie D. ; Caron, David A. ; Gast, Rebecca J. ; Sanders, Robert W.
    Mixotrophic nanoflagellates (MNF) were quantified in plankton and sea ice of the Ross Sea, Antarctica, during austral spring. Tracer experiments using fluorescently labeled bacteria (FLB) were conducted to enumerate MNF and determine their contribution to total chloroplastidic and total bacterivorous nanoflagellates. Absolute abundances of MNF were typically <200 ml–1 in plankton assemblages south of the Polar Front, but they comprised 8 to 42% and 3 to 25% of bacterivorous nanoflagellates in the water column and ice cores, respectively. Moreover, they represented up to 10% of all chloroplastidic nanoflagellates in the water column when the prymnesiophyte Phaeocystis antarctica was blooming (up to 23% if P. antarctica, which did not ingest FLB, was excluded from calculations). In ice cores, MNF comprised 5 to 10% of chloroplastidic nanoflagellates. The highest proportions of MNF were found in some surface water samples and in plankton assemblages beneath ice, suggesting a potentially large effect as bacterial grazers in those locations. This study is the first to report abundances and distributions of mixotrophic flagellates in the Southern Ocean. The presence of MNF in every ice and water sample examined suggests that mixotrophy is an important alternative dietary strategy in this region.
  • Article
    Mixotrophic activity and diversity of Antarctic marine protists in austral summer
    (Frontiers Media, 2018-02-02) Gast, Rebecca J. ; Fay, Scott A. ; Sanders, Robert W.
    Identifying putative mixotrophic protist species in the environment is important for understanding their behavior, with the recovery of these species in culture essential for determining the triggers of feeding, grazing rates, and overall impact on bacterial standing stocks. In this project, mixotroph abundances determined using tracer ingestion in water and sea ice samples collected in the Ross Sea, Antarctica during the summer of 2011 were compared with data from the spring (Ross Sea) and fall (Arctic) to examine the impacts of bacterivory/mixotrophy. Mixotrophic nanoplankton (MNAN) were usually less abundant than heterotrophs, but consumed more of the bacterial standing stock per day due to relatively higher ingestion rates (1–7 bacteria mixotroph−1 h−1 vs. 0.1–4 bacteria heterotroph−1 h−1). Yet, even with these high rates observed in the Antarctic summer, mixotrophs appeared to have a smaller contribution to bacterivory than in the Antarctic spring. Additionally, putative mixotroph taxa were identified through incubation experiments accomplished with bromodeoxyuridine-labeled bacteria as food, immunoprecipitation (IP) of labeled DNA, and amplification and high throughput sequencing of the eukaryotic ribosomal V9 region. Putative mixotroph OTUs were identified in the IP samples by taxonomic similarity to known phototroph taxa. OTUs that had increased abundance in IP samples compared to the non-IP samples from both surface and chlorophyll maximum (CM) depths were considered to represent active mixotrophy and include ones taxonomically similar to Dictyocha, Gymnodinium, Pentapharsodinium, and Symbiodinium. These OTUs represent target taxa for isolation and laboratory experiments on triggers for mixotrophy, to be combined with qPCR to estimate their abundance, seasonal distribution and potential impact.