Insights into biotic and abiotic modulation of ocean mesopelagic communities

Marine plankton mitigate anthropogenic greenhouse gases, modulate biogeochemical cycles, and provide fishery resources. Plankton is distributed across a stratified ecosystem of sunlit surface waters and a vast, though understudied, mesopelagic ‘dark ocean’. In this study, we mapped viruses, prokaryotes, and pico-eukaryotes across 32 globally-distributed cross-depth samples collected during the Tara Oceans Expedition, and assessed their ecologies. Based on depth and O 2 measurements, we divided the marine habitat into epipelagic, oxic mesopelagic, and oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) eco-regions. We identified specific communities associated with each marine habitat, and pinpoint environmental drivers of dark ocean communities. Our results indicate that water masses primarily control mesopelagic community composition. Through co-occurrence network inference and analysis, we identified signature communities strongly associated with OMZ eco-regions. Mesopelagic communities appear to be constrained by a combination of factors compared to epipelagic communities. Thus, variations in a given abiotic factor may cause different responses in sunlit and dark ocean communities. This study expands our knowledge about the ecology of planktonic organisms inhabiting the mesopelagic zone