Acknowledgments
We thank Chi Xu fruitful discussion that greatly improved the manuscript. Funding: This research was a product of the project “Coping with deltas in transition” within the Programme of Strategic Scientific Alliances between China and The Netherlands (PSA) financed by the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology (2016YFE0133700), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41676084). Author contributions: Q.-X. L. designed research; W.-S. H. and M. H. performed research; W.-S. H. and H. P. Z. contributed new analyzed data; W.-S. H. and F. Z. contributed computer code; W.V. contributed the experimental diatom strains and experimental details; All authors contributed substantially to discussion of the content, wrote the article and reviewed and edited the manuscript before submission. Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.Data and materials availability: all data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the supplementary Materials. The code to reproduce the results of this study is available on the publicly repository Dryad, DOI: 10.5061/dryad.547d7wm41.