Caption
Conceptual schematic of the MacDonald-Pfitzer hypothesis and estimated output parameters from finite mixture models. As predicted by the MacDonald-Pfitzer hypothesis, a diatom population (represented here as a histogram of cellular apical length) will through time reduce in mean apical length (l) and increase in length variability (r). The third parameter, k, represents the number of cells at t = 1 over the number of cells in all three unimodal distributions.
