Marine protists are integral to the structure and function of pelagic ecosystems and marine carbon cycling, with rhizarian biomass alone accounting for more than half of all mesozooplankton in the oligotrophic oceans. Yet, understanding how their environment shapes diversity within species and across taxa is limited by a paucity of observations of heritability and life history. Here, we present observations of asexual reproduction, morphologic plasticity, and ontogeny in the planktic foraminifer Neogloboquadrina pachyderma in laboratory culture. Our results demonstrate that planktic foraminifera reproduce both sexually and asexually and demonstrate extensive phenotypic plasticity in response to nonheritable factors. These two processes fundamentally explain the rapid spatial and temporal response of even imperceptibly low populations of planktic foraminifera to optimal conditions and the diversity and ubiquity of these species across the range of environmental conditions that occur in the ocean.

Despite the increasing use of linear inverse modeling techniques to elucidate fluxes in undersampled marine ecosystems, the accuracy with which they estimate food web flows has not been resolved. New Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) solution methods have also called into question the biases of the commonly used L2 minimum norm (L2MN) solution technique. Here, we test the abilities of MCMC and L2MN methods to recover field-measured ecosystem rates that are sequentially excluded from the model input. For data, we use experimental measurements from process cruises of the California Current Ecosystem (CCE-LTER) Program that include rate estimates of phytoplankton and bacterial production, micro- and mesozooplankton grazing, and carbon export from eight study sites varying from rich coastal upwelling to offshore oligotrophic conditions. Both the MCMC and L2MN methods predicted well-constrained rates of protozoan and mesozooplankton grazing with reasonable accuracy, but the MCMC method overestimated primary production. The MCMC method more accurately predicted the poorly constrained rate of vertical carbon export than the L2MN method, which consistently overestimated export. Results involving DOC and bacterial production were equivocal. Overall, when primary production is provided as model input, the MCMC method gives a robust depiction of ecosystem processes. Uncertainty in inverse ecosystem models is large and arises primarily from solution under-determinacy. We thus suggest that experimental programs focusing on food web fluxes expand the range of experimental measurements to include the nature and fate of detrital pools, which play large roles in the model. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.