Microbes and the Dissipation of Energy and Respiration: From Cells to Ecosystems

In the year 1974, Larry Pomeroy first proposed that microbes were true movers of energy and nutrients in marine food webs (Pomeroy, 1974). This idea was later formalized as the “microbial loop” (Azam et al., 1983; Pomeroy et al., this issue) in which energy and carbon lost from the planktonic food web in the form of dissolved organic matter (DOM) was recovered and repackaged by heterotrophic bacterioplankton to particulate organic matter (POM). Their ecological role within the microbial loop is to facilitate the transformation of DOM to POM (a trophic “link”) (Azam et al., 1983) or to remineralize DOM back to its inor-