Allometric scaling and morphological variation in sinking rate of phytoplankton

Since the first decades of the last century, several hypotheses have been proposed on the role of phytoplankton morphology in maintaining a favorable position in the water column. Here, by an extensive review of literature on sinking rate and cell volume, we firstly attempted to explore the dependency of sinking rate on morphological traits using the allometric scaling approach. We found that sinking rate tends to increase with increasing cell volume showing the allometric scaling exponent of 0.43, which is significantly different than the Stokes’ law exponent of 0.66. The violation of the 2/3 power rule clearly indicates that cell shape changes as size increases. Both size and shape affect how phytoplankton sinking drives nutrient acquisition and losses to sinking. Interestingly, from an evolutionary perspective, simple and complex cylindrical shapes can get much larger than spherical and spheroidal shapes and sink at similar rates, but simple and complex cylindrical shapes cannot get small enough to sink slower than small spherical and spheroidal shapes. Cell shape complexity is a morphological attribute resulting from the combination of two or more simple geometric shapes. While the effect of size on sinking rate is well documented, this study deepens the knowledge on how cell shape or geometry affect sinking rates that still needs further consideration.