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Climate scaling behaviour in the dynamics of the marine interstitial ciliate community

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Abstract

The present paper uses characteristics of the marine interstitial ciliate community in the White Sea intertidal sandflat during the period of 1991–2011, in order to study its long-term dynamics, investigating in particular whether it exhibits scaling behaviour into its fluctuations, which is a characteristic feature of the climate system. To this aim, a recently proposed version of the detrended fluctuation analysis is herewith employed which has been successfully applied to a wide range of simulated and physiologic time series in recent years. In case that the fluctuations of the ciliate community present self-similarity processes, an ideal field test for the currently proposed biological models will be established, allowing to evaluate their reliability. Indeed, we show for the first time that different ciliate species exhibit long-range power-law persistent correlations. This means that ciliate fluctuations in different intervals are positively correlated, obeying a power-law behaviour. Although the origin of power-law temporal evolution of ciliates should be further investigated, this finding is probably associated with the self-organized criticality of ciliates. It should be noted that the long-range correlations obtained do not imply the presence of specific cycles but rather the existence of dynamic links between long-term and short-term temporal evolution. The scaling behaviour found in marine interstitial ciliate community should be taken into account in the investigation of their response to the present or future climate change.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Climate Research Group, Division of Environmental Physics and Meteorology, Faculty of Physics, University of Athens, University Campus Bldg. Phys. V, Athens, 15784, Greece

    Costas A. Varotsos, Maria N. Efstathiou & Chris G. Tzanis

  2. Department of Zoology and Ecology, Penza State University, Krasnaya str., 40, Penza, 440026, Russia

    Yuri A. Mazei

  3. Department of Hydrobiology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Leninskiye gory, 1, Moscow, 119991, Russia

    Igor Burkovsky

Authors
  1. Costas A. Varotsos
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  2. Yuri A. Mazei
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  3. Igor Burkovsky
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  4. Maria N. Efstathiou
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  5. Chris G. Tzanis
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Correspondence to Costas A. Varotsos.

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Varotsos, C.A., Mazei, Y.A., Burkovsky, I. et al. Climate scaling behaviour in the dynamics of the marine interstitial ciliate community. Theor Appl Climatol 125, 439–447 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-015-1520-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-015-1520-0

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