Abstract
During the 1983 ‘el Niño’, filter fractionation showed that over 80% of the chlorophyll-based phytoplankton biomass in the Santa Barbara Channel was max preceded sunrise and sunset, respectively, and the photosynthetic periodicity was independent of both chlorophyll content and dark fixation of inorganic carbon. Unlike previous studies on diel periodicity in phytoplankton, no significant oscillations in light-limited rates of photosynthesis (α) were detected in either size fraction. As a result, diurnal primary production calculated from a single mid-day estimate of α and did not exceed primary production estimated from a temporal series of P-I curves by >25%.

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