Thermal discharge-created increasing temperatures alter the bacterioplankton composition and functional redundancy

Jinbo Xiong, Shangling Xiong, Peng Qian, Demin Zhang, Lian Liu, Yuejun Fei

Elevated seawater temperature has altered the coupling between coastal primary production and heterotrophic bacterioplankton respiration. This shift, in turn, could influence the feedback of ocean ecosystem to climate warming. However, little is known about how natural bacterioplankton community responds to increasing seawater temperature. To investigate warming effects on the bacterioplankton community, we collected water samples from temperature gradients (ranged from 15.0 to 18.6 °C) created by a thermal flume of a coal power plant. The results showed that increasing temperatures significantly stimulated bacterial abundance, grazing rate, and altered bacterioplankton community compositions (BCCs). The spatial distribution of bacterioplankton community followed a distance similarity decay relationship, with a turnover of 0.005. A variance partitioning analysis showed that temperature directly constrained 2.01 % variation in BCCs, while temperature-induced changes in water geochemical and grazing rate indirectly accounted for 4.03 and 12.8 % of the community variance, respectively. Furthermore, the relative abundances of 24 bacterial families were linearly increased or decreased (P < 0.05 in all cases) with increasing temperatures. Notably, the change pattern for a given bacterial family was in concert with its known functions. In addition, community functional redundancy consistently decreased along the temperature gradient. This study demonstrates that elevated temperature, combined with substrate supply and trophic interactions, dramatically alters BCCs, concomitant with decreases in functional redundancy. The responses of sensitive assemblages are temperature dependent, which could indicate temperature departures.