“…Although iron was not measured in this study, several reports have determined that an adequate iron supply from diverse sources, including melting from the base of glaciers, upwelling CDW in ASP (Gerringa et al, 2012;Sherrell et al, 2015) and shelf sediments (de Jong et al, 2013;Hatta et al, 2013) probably stimulated and sustained the growth of phytoplankton in these areas. Similarly, the high abundance of heterotrophic prokaryotes and their strong correlation with picoeukaryote abundance and Chl-a concentration in these two clusters (Table 2; Figure 8), suggests that a large amount of organic carbon was provided by phytoplankton and this promoted the growth of heterotrophic prokaryotes (Granéli et al, 2004;Pearce et al, 2007;Hyun et al, 2016;Serret et al, 2016). Viral abundances were also high in cluster three, whereas they were relatively low in cluster four; viruses were not significantly correlated with heterotrophic prokaryotes, picoeukaryotes or Chl-a.…”