Nutrients in lakes

Our goal in this chapter is to understand the distribution of nutrients in lakes. To

achieve that goal, we began by considering the flow of energy in and out of lakes
because, as you just saw, energy flux into temperate lakes leads to mixing of the
water column in spring and fall and stratification of water in summer and winter.
When the water mixes, nutrients mix and when the water does not mix, nutrients
are less likely to mix as well. These patterns can have significant effects on the
build up of plant material in lakes (eutrophication), which is a significant concern
in many areas.

We begin this page by talking about nutrients. While our focus in this chapter is
on understanding lakes, we will return to this topic in the next chapter as we try to
understand why fertilizing the oceans with iron might affect the global distribution
of carbon. A note about “orders of magnitudes” in light of the upcoming topic in
chapter 5. The concentration of nutrients in lakes is often much higher than in
the open ocean. Pay attention to the order of magnitude of the concentrations of
nutrients as we cover them. The quantities of nutrients are critical in determining
how they effect the environment and make all the difference in the world between
whether something is a “nutrient” or a “pollutant”.

What are nutrients? To an ecologists, nutrients are elements (like carbon,

nitrogen, and phosphorus) that are the fundamental atomic building blocks of
living tissues. What they are these nutrients? Let’s “back of the envelope” this.
What are the dominant chemical constituents of living organisms?

They are proteins, nucleic acids, carbohydrates, and lipids, all bathes in an
aqueous solution of salts. Do you recall the chemical components of those
molecules? Which elements are most important?

On one level if they are all essential then they are all equally important. But in
practice, that is not always true. Generally for management and environmental
problems, we are interested in elements that are generally in short supply in the
environment or elements for which human activity has strongly altered their
availability.

There are 16 elements that are generally considered essential for plant growth.
The macronutrients are C, H, O, N, P, K, S, Ca, Mg and the micronutrients are
Fe, Mn, B, Zn, Cu, Mo, Cl. For management purposes, in fresh water systems
and on land, we are primarily interested in nitrogen, phosphorous and carbon.

The subject of biogeochemistry focuses on the stocks and flows of nutrient

elements. Given the extent to which humans are affecting almost every
biogeochemical cycle, the interested student is strongly encouraged to study
biogeochemistry in more detail. Here we will only present the basics and
encourage you to investigate further on your own.

It is important to have a sense where the different elements are located. The
atmosphere is primarily nitrogen and oxygen with trace amounts of water and
carbon (primarily as carbon dioxide CO2 but also as methane CH4). While the
atmosphere is the major reservoir of nitrogen on earth, nitrogen in the
atmosphere is in its elemental (diatomic N2) form and as such has a very strong
triple bond that is difficult to break. Only a few bacteria and blue green algae
contain the enzyme (nitrogenase) that is capable of breaking this bond (“fixing
nitrogen”) and rendering the nitrogen available for use by most living organisms
(hence the planting of legumes that contain a symbiotic bacteria that can “fix”
nitrogen and increase the concentration of available nitrogen in soils. Much has
been written lately about the extent to which industrial fixation of nitrogen via the
Haber process has now overtaken the amount of nitrogen fixed biologically. The
effects of this dramatic change in the flux of nitrogen in our earth is not fully
understood. If you are interested, a good reference can be found at
http://www.esa.org/science/Issues/FileEnglish/issue1.pdf

In aquatic environments, the dominant elements are hydrogen and oxygen.

There are also a variety of salts dominated by the cations Na+, K+, Mg2+, and Ca2+
and the anions Cl-, SO42-, and NO3-. In fresh water systems the concentrations of
salts can vary quite a bit from one location to another (see for example the story
in the previous chapter on the influx of road salts into urban watersheds). Salt
water systems are notable for being extraordinarily constant from one location to
another.

Minerals and rocks contain all the other elements, including phosphorous, which
is not found in high abundance anywhere else, and metals.

In the late 1950’s and early1960’s, Alfred Redfield examined the composition of
samples from deep oceans around the world. He found a curious fact
Concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorous and some other elements in the
deep ocean were highly correlated. They tended to go up or down together.
Water samples that were high in nitrogen tended also to be high in phosphorous.
He interpreted this in terms of the particular rainfall of deep oceans. Living
organisms in the surface oceans create living packages of organic matter (cells)
that have characteristic ratios of major elements. He assumed that they rained
down into the bottom waters and enriched those waters in elements in proportion
to their relative abundance in living cells.
The Classic Marine Ratios are expressed in atoms per atom of P (or in terms of
moles per mole of P)
The Classic Marine Ratios1
Element Redfield Ratio
C 106
H 263
O 110
N 16
Si 15
P 1
S 0.6
(FE, Zn, 0.01
Mn)
(Cu, Cd, 0.001
Ni)

This is a remarkable insight. It means that to build phytoplanktons (or more or

less any living cell) we need to find atoms in certainly fairly discrete ratios. If we
are going to grow by adding 1 P atom, we need also to find 106 C atoms and 17
N atoms. The cell then increased by that many atoms and the environment
decreases by that many atoms. It is quite analogous to baking a cake. If you run
out of eggs, it does not matter how much flour you have, you can’t make any
more cake.

A few caveats to put forward. One – structural material can change the ratios
substantially. Vertebrate bones are built largely of calcium phosphates. Tree
trunks are largely cellulose and lignin (carbon-rich molecules). Diatoms, a large
group of phytoplankton have silica frustrules “ shells” that built of silicates.
Certain physiological processes can also change ratios and many ecologists and
environmental bioinorganic chemists are interested in the ways in which changes
in element composition of the environment affects physiology and the way in
which changes in physiology affect the demand for elements from the
environment.

1
Morel, F.M.M. and R.J.M. Hudson. 1985. The geobiological cycle of trace
elements in aquatic systems: Redfield revisited. pp.143-165 in Stumm, W. (ed.)
Chemical Processes in Lakes. John Wiley and Sons. New York.
Day, J.W. Jr., C.A.S Hall, W.M. Kemp, and A. Yáñez-Arancibia. 1989. Estuarine
EcologyJohn Wiley and Sons, New York.
Redfield, A.C. 1958. The biological control of chemical factors in the
environment. American Scientist 46:205-221.
 We are interested in understanding what elements will limit production of
phytoplankton (and macrophytes) in lakes. Macronutrients that are low in
precipitation are likely to be limiting in freshwater environments.

Element Algal Atomic Ratios Avg. Conc. in Relative

Conc. Weights Lakes Scarcity
(% by (% by weight) Algal
weight) Conc./Lake
Conc.
O 80.5 15.9994 1,948 89 0.9
H 9.7 1.0079 3,726 11 0.9
C 6.5 12.011 210 0.0012 5416.7
Si 1.3 28.086 18 0.00065 2000.0
N 0.7 14.0067 19 0.000023 30434.8
Ca 0.4 40.08 4 0.0015 266.7
K 0.3 39.09 3 0.00023 1304.3
P 0.08 30.97376 1 0.000001 80000.0
Mg 0.07 24.305 1.1 0.0004 175.0
S 0.06 32.06 0.72 0.0004 150.0
Cl 0.06 35.453 0.66 0.0004 150.0
Na 0.04 22.98977 0.67 0.0006 66.7
Fe 0.02 55.847 0.14 0.00007 285.7
B 0.001 10.81 0.036 0.00001 100.0
Mn 0.0007 54.938 0.0049 0.0000015 466.7
Zn 0.0003 65.38 0.0018 0.000001 300.0
Cu 0.0001 63.546 0.00061 0.000001 100.0
Mo 0.00005 95.94 0.00020 0.0000003 166.7
Co 0.000002 58.9332 0.000013 0.000000005 400.0
This table is based on expressing concentrations on a "wet-weight" basis.
2

As you can tell from this table, nitrogen and phosphorous are the elements that
are most scarce in a typical aquatic environment, which phosphorus being even
more limiting (e.g. the element we will run out of first) than nitrogen.

These are also the elements that make up fertilizers that farmers use.
Consequently, then excess fertilizers are applied to fields and those fields do not
contain any sort of buffer region between the fields and the streams, nitrogen and
phosphorous concentrations can increase substantially in streams, which lead
2
Recalculated from data in Wetzel 1983, after Vallentyne 1974
Wetzel, R.G. 1983. Limnology, Second Edition. Saunders College Publishing.
New York
into lakes. Elevated levels of nitrogen and phosphorous from agricultural run off
(and also from fertilizers that are applied to suburban lawns) release the
phosphorous and nitrogen limitations that phytoplankton experience and lead to
an algal bloom. These blooms that stimulate bacterial growth (which can use the
phytoplankton as food). When bacteria grow, they consume oxygen, which
lowers dissolved oxygen levels in lakes, which makes fish unhappy.
Consequently the two most obvious signs of excess nutrient loading in lakes are
excess plant growth (eutrophication) and a decrease in the concentration of
dissolved oxygen, which can lead to fish death.

Keep these ideas in mind as we move onto the next chapter and begin to
consider ways to engineer our planet to combat human-induced climate change.

Let’s do a back of the envelope calculation.

How many Nitrogen atoms are there in a human?

Call the human body about 60 kg.

Lets assume 1/4 is bone (15 kg)
The rest (45 kg) is undifferentiated protoplasm
The bone is mostly Calcium Phosphate, and thus contains little or no N
Of the rest, most of it is water. About 70% of meat is water, or about 30%
is dry biomass.

using the Redfield ratios as a rough guess, we have

Redfield Atomic Proportion by Weight
weight
C 106 12 0.321277
H 263 1 0.066428
O 110 16 0.444534
N 16 14 0.056577
Si 15 26 0.098505
P 1 31 0.00783
S 0.6 32 0.004849

Which suggests that N is about 6% of the total dry weight of organisms.

So, 6% of 30% of 75% of 60 kg = 0.81 kg of N (with a molecular weight of

14 g/mol, we get about 58 moles of N
For more information on nutrient pollution in aquatic systems, see these two
references: http://www.esa.org/science/Issues/FileEnglish/issue7.pdf
http://www.esa.org/science/Issues/FileEnglish/issue3.pdf