Carbon subsidies in the form of glucose alleviate the dependence of
heterotrophic bacteria on photoautotroph derived C exudates. This should result in
an increase in resource space and biomass for heterotrophs and a decrease in
resource space and biomass for photoautotrophs due to increased competition for
mineral nutrients (for simplicity we illustrate competition for P but this is equally applicable other elements that may limit primary production). We hypothesized that this predicted change in biomass pool size
of these two groups will result in changes in the plankton community
composition of both groups that will propagate to to the composition of biofilm
communities for both groups. We refer to shifts in the demand and availability of resources among components of the microbial community as 'partitioning. Blue rods represent heterotrophs, green stars represent photoautotrophs, brown diamonds represent EPS or other cohesive components of a biofilm.
