Protistan Plankton in the Peruvian Humboldt Current System

The Humboldt current system hosts one of the largest fisheries in the world supporting the life of millions of people due to the tremendous primary production. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to better understand predicted impacts due to climate change like alternating upwelling intensities and light impediment on the structure and the trophic role of protistan plankton communities as they play a pivotal role of the food web. During the CUSCO campaign eight offshore-mesocosms were deployed and two light scenarios (low light, LL; high light, HL) were created by darkening half of the mesocosms. Upwelling was simulated by injecting distinct proportions (0%, 15%, 30% and 45%) of collected deep-water (DW) into each of the moored mesocosms. We analyzed the changes in diversity, structure, and trophic role of protistan plankton communities for the induced manipulations using DNA metabarcoding by analyzing the V9 18S rRNA gene amplicons.