The paradox of the plankton was originally described in 1961 by G. Evelyn Hutchinson, who proposed that the paradox could be resolved by factors such as vertical gradients of light or turbulence, symbiosis or commensalism, differential predation, or constantly changing environmental conditions.Hutchinson, G. E. (1961) The paradox of the plankton. American Naturalist 95, 137-145. This was supported by later studies which found that the paradox can be resolved by factors such as: zooplankton grazing pressure;McCauley, E. and Briand, F. (1979) Zooplankton grazing and phytoplankton species richness: Field tests of the predation hypothesis Limnol. Oceanogr. 24(2), 243-252. chaotic fluid motion;Károlyi, G., Péntek, Á., Scheuring, I., Tél, T., Toroczkai, Z. (2000) Chaotic flow: the physics of species coexistence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97, 13661-13665. size-selective grazing;Wiggert, J.D., Haskell, A.G.E., Paffenhofer, G.A., Hofmann, E.E. and Klinck, J.M. (2005) The role of feeding behavior in sustaining copepod populations in the tropical ocean . Journal of Plankton Research 27, 1013-1031. spatio-temporal heterogeneity;Miyazaki, T., Tainaka, K., Togashi, T., Suzuki, T. and Yoshimura, J. (2006) Spatial coexistence of phytoplankton species in ecological timescale . Population Ecology 48(2), 107-112. bacterial mediation; or environmental fluctuations. More generally, some researchers suggest that ecological and environmental factors continually interact such that the planktonic habitat never reaches an equilibrium for which a single species is favoured.Scheffer, M., Rinaldi, S., Huisman, J. and Weissing, F.J. (2003) Why plankton communities have no equilibrium: solutions to the paradox. Hydrobiologia 491, 9-18. In Mitchell et al. (2008), researchers found that small-scale analysis of plankton distribution exhibited patches of aggregation, on the order of 10 cm, that had sufficient lifetimes (> 10 minutes) to enable plankton grazing, competition, and infection.Mitchell, J.G., Yamazaki, H., Seuront, L., Wolk, F., Li, H. (2008) Phytoplankton patch patterns: Seascape anatomy in a turbulent ocean. Journal of Marine Systems 69, 247-253.
