Abstract
Through the culture experiments on a marine plankton diatom, Skeletonema costatum, the following phenomena were observed.
When diatom growth progresses in the culture media which prepared from sea water and enriched with nitrate or ammonium respectively, the value of titratable base increases in the former but decreases in the latter. quantitative determinations show that the changes of this chemical component to the opposite directions in both media are exactly proportional, with the same ratio, to the increased amount of diatom, in other words, to the amount of nitrogen consumed by diatom.
On the important meanings involved in these facts were discussed from the stand point of chemical oceanography.
