Turbulence intermittency, small-scale phytoplankton patchiness and encounter rates in plankton: where do we go from here?

Turbulence is widely recognized to enhance contact rates between planktonic predators and their prey. However, previous estimates of contact rates are implicitly based on homogeneous distributions of both turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rates and phytoplanktonic prey, while turbulent processes and phytoplankton cell distributions have now been demonstrated to be highly intermittent even on small scales. Turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rates and intermittent (i.e. patchy) phytoplankton distributions can be wholly parameterized in the frame of universal multifractals. Using this framework and assuming statistical independence between turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate and phytoplankton distributions, we evaluated the effect of intermittent turbulence and the potential effects of zooplankton behavioral responses to small-scale phytoplankton patchiness on predator–prey encounter rates. Our results indicated that the effects of turbulence on predator–prey encounter rates is about 35% less important when intermittently fluctuating turbulent dissipation rates are considered instead of a mean dissipation value. Taking into account zooplankton behavioral adaptations to phytoplankton patchiness increased encounter rates up to a factor of 60.