Phytoplankton Vs Phosphorus Essay

Introduction Phytoplankton require nutrients and light to survive. Certain nutrients are a limiting factor in phytoplankton competition and composition. Some phytoplankton are limited by nitrogen while others may be limited by phosphorus (Quigg, 2016). The experiment in this paper will determine if a body of water is limited by nitrogen or phosphorus by running a resource limitation assay. Nutrient levels in bodies of water may change seasonally in a natural way (Vanni and Temte, 1990). Nutrients can also be added to the water from manmade resources such as run-off (Elser et al, 2009). Run-off from human cities and farms will alter the natural limiting nutrient found in the Galveston Bay waters. This could cause an influx of taxa that has phosphorus as its limiting nutrient which would change the ecosystem food web. Typically, most marine taxa are limited by nitrogen whereas most freshwater taxa are limited by phosphorus (Sin et al, 1999). …show more content…
Some bodies of water can be nitrogen-rich but likely in the Galveston Bay and Galveston Ship Channel, it could be manmade run-off. To determine which taxa are more abundant based on the addition of different nutrients a chlorophyll analysis and visual analysis can be used. I want to determine the community composition based on different nutrient levels using chlorophyll analysis. This can also be compared to visual analysis of the sample water by identifying phytoplankton genera. I believe that different limiting nutrients will greatly affect the community composition and that the nitrogen-rich assays will have the most abundance of phytoplankton.
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