The “blue tears” in Matsu County might be a result of environmental stresses affecting the reproductive cycle of the organisms that cause the phenomenon, a study in Frontiers in Marine Science authored by a research team at National Taiwan Ocean University said.
The blue luminescence in the sea near Matsu from April to August — known locally as “blue tears” — is a tourist attraction and has been listed by CNN as one of the top 15 natural scenic wonders of the world.
The blue tears result when sexual reproduction among Noctiluca scintillans, a bioluminescent red-tide algae, rapidly increases, National Taiwan Ocean University professor Chiang Kuo-ping (蔣國平) said on Friday.
Photo courtesy of Lienchiang County Government
The study sought to determine factors that prompt an uptick in sexual reproduction of the organisms, which usually reproduce asexually, and the ecological role in that change, Chiang said.
“Reproduction in N scintillans involves both sexual and asexual processes. The vegetative cell, or trophont cell, mostly undergoes binary fission, but randomly undergoes gametogenesis, which produces gametes that afterward fuse in pairs form zygotes,” the authors wrote, adding that gametogenesis — which enables sexual reproduction — might be triggered by environmental stresses, “including temperature, light exposure time, prey concentration, N scintillans concentration, cultivation time, cultivation volume and simulated wave motion.”
The reproduction cycle occurs annually, usually between March and July, with the arrival of sediment from the Min River (閩江) — which enters the Taiwan Strait near Fuzhou in China’s Fujian Province — resulting in red tides in the morning and the “blue tears” at night, Chiang said, adding that the phenomenon usually occurs for one or two days.
The critical value for N scintillans to reproduce sexually was found to be 35,400 prey cells for each N scintillans, indicating that the fewer prey cells there are after a certain amount of population growth, the more likely it is that N scintillans would reproduce sexually, he said.
The team found that after an exponential phase of population growth, the encounter rate with prey decreases, prompting an increase in the sexual reproduction rate from the usual 1 percent to as much as 10 percent of the population, Chiang said.
This results in the “blue tears” bloom and also lays the foundation for the next bloom period, he said.
The study, Sexual reproduction in dinoflagellates — the case of Noctiluca scintillans and its ecological implications, was authored by doctoral student Jeffery Lee (李良能), and coauthored by Chiang and assistant professor Tsai Sheng-fang (蔡昇芳).
It was published in the journal’s Nov. 17 edition.
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