{"schema":"pubphys.bundle/1","record":{"author":{"account_ref":null,"orcid":null},"builds_on":[],"content_schema":"pubphys.content.revision/1","content_sha256":"24f38f79bfc93a4d0fc715e7c19122c1e4e27d2e4f90e2fd7bc82442c9fd4cd5","created":"2026-10-03T07:17:57Z","files":[],"origin":{"assisted_by":[],"kind":"seed"},"parents":["5475cf5dc5b1a72283d26dc95dc6e00d7ea4e00096a7c6492e409a1816eeb011"],"salt":"08f967e480051a81ed63c1cc652f2d54dfa273136ea61b73e4d4a20a2855ac20","schema":"pubphys.record/2","site":"pubphys.com","target":null,"type":"revision"},"content":{"answer_type":"mechanism","assisted_by":[],"external_id":"bio.ecosystem-statphys.plankton-paradox","kind":"phenomenon","literature_status":"open","n":"1","parents":[],"plain":"The competitive exclusion principle says that, at steady state, no more species can coexist than there are limiting resources such as nitrogen, phosphorus and light. Ocean and lake plankton contain hundreds of species living on about ten resources, which is the paradox of the plankton.","posed_since":"1961","precise":"In a well-mixed chemostat at steady state, the number of coexisting consumer species cannot exceed the number R of limiting resources for generic parameters; natural phytoplankton communities have of order $10^{2}$ to $10^{3}$ coexisting taxa with $R \\sim 10$ (approximately). Candidate explanations include intrinsically generated chaos or oscillations, spatial and temporal heterogeneity, exact metabolic trade-offs, predator-mediated coexistence, cross-feeding and neutral drift with immigration. An answer identifies which mechanism accounts quantitatively for observed diversity and its scaling with R, with a discriminating prediction such as abundance-fluctuation statistics.","problem_ref":null,"references":"","settled_by":"Time series and resource measurements from natural or mesocosm plankton communities that confirm the abundance statistics predicted by one mechanism and rule out the others.","status_note":"A 2017 Physical Review Letters model showed exact metabolic budget constraints allow unlimited coexistence, but the exactness required is fine-tuned.","title":"Why hundreds of plankton species coexist on a few 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