Patterns of Night-Time Respiration in a Dense Phytoplankton Community Under a Natural Light Regime

In the study night-time patterns of respiration in outdoor flow-through algal ponds were examined under conditions where many of the problems above were less important or absent. The algal ponds had a dense phytoplankton community but macrozooplankton and sediment were not present. Therefore, it is argued that algae are the main respiring organisms. Calculations of respiration were based upon nearly continuous open-water measurements of oxygen and temperature, giving higher time resolution (30 min) and lower variance than is possible with bottle incubations