Allometric scaling and morphological variation in sinking rate of phytoplankton

Since the first decades of the last century, several hypotheses have been proposed on the role of phytoplankton morphology in maintaining a favorable position in the water column. Here, by an extensive review of literature on sinking rate and cell volume, we firstly attempted to explore the dependency of sinking rate on morphological traits using the allometric scaling approach. We found that sinking rate tends to increase with increasing cell...