Diatom-based food webs are fairly unstable and their
dynamics resemble that of a batch culture. Cell abundance
and chlorophyll increase rapidly and then drop back, once
zooplankton has developed enough to graze efficiently.
Such a food web structure leads to rapid export of
photosynthetic carbon to the deep ocean because considerable
losses occur at each step, for example through
sedimentation of copepod faecal pellets. Despite our
reasonable understanding of diatom-based food webs,
novel processes that may play a role in their regulation
have been discovered recently: for example, diatoms seem
to be able to inhibit egg development in their main
predator, copepods (Miralto et al., 1999).