Comment: Unimodal relationship between phytoplankton-mass-specific growth rate and size: A reply to the comment by Sal and Lopez-Urrutia

Sal and López-Urrutia (2011) had two criticisms of our analysis on the relationship between community-based, temperature-corrected, mass-specific growth rates of natu-ral phytoplankton assemblages under nutrient-enriched conditions and average size based on data from dilution experiments in surface waters of the global ocean (Chen and Liu 2010). Two individual data sources (Chen et al. 2009; Sherr et al. 2009) used photoacclimation-corrected growth rates, while other data were not corrected for photoacclimation. If uncorrected data in Chen et al. (2009) were used in the analysis, the quadratic term in the unimodal fit became insignificant, but the slope of the linear fit was still significantly positive, suggesting that larger phytoplankton grow faster. However, if a lower temperature coefficient (activation energy E 5 0.32 e