Stoichiometric mismatch causes a warming-induced regime shift in experimental plankton communities

Many plant and algal communities respond to warming with shifts towards more carbon-rich species and growth forms, thus diluting essential elements in their biomass and intensifying the stoichiometric mismatch with herbivore nutrient requirements. The dataset is from a 95-day mesocosm experiment on the spring succession of an assembled plankton community in which we manipulated temperature (ambient vs. +3.6°C) and presence vs. absence of two types of grazers (ciliates and Daphnia) in a 2x2x2 factorial design with 3 replicates of each treatment (= 24 mesocosms in total). All mesocosms were initially stocked with low amounts of 6 phytoplankton taxa and were spontaneously colonized by an additional 6 taxa over the course of the experiment.

At ambient temperatures, a typical spring succession developed, where a moderate bloom of nutritionally adequate phytoplankton was grazed down to a clear-water phase by a developing Daphnia population.

Warming accelerated initial Daphnia population...