 Hi, I'm Oscar Sosa. Thank you for checking out our LNO article. Oceanographers have long recognized that marine surface waters are super saturated with methane, indicating that biological processes in the ocean have the potential of being an important source of atmospheric methane. This observation was previously known as the ocean methane paradox, because methanogenesis was thought to be limited to anaerobic systems. We now know that the ocean harvors microbial methanogenic pathways that can take place in well oxygenated waters. But the contribution of each pathway and the environmental processes that control methane production are not well constrained. In recent years, we have found that bacteria in the ocean can release methane, as well as ethylene gas, during the degradation of methylphosphonate and 2-hydroxyethylphosphonate. These compounds are abundant in marine dissolved organic matter, or DOM, and represent an important source of bioavailable phosphorus for bacteria. To gain a better understanding of how phosphonate cycling contributes to methane and ethylene supersaturation in the operation, we sample the region in the North Atlantic Ocean featuring a strong transition in phosphate concentrations, from nutrient-rich New England shelf waters to the oligotrophic Sargasso Sea near Bermuda. We hypothesized that phosphate depletion would promote phosphonate degradation and supersaturation of methane and ethylene. We found that the levels of methane and ethylene supersaturation were in fact highest in Sargasso Sea surface waters, where inorganic phosphate concentrations were lowest. Shelf waters also contained high levels of methane, though we suspect this can be attributed to the presence of gas seeps at shallow depths. Metatronomic analysis confirmed that a large fraction of the bacterial plankton community in the Sargasso Sea encodes the carbon-phosphorous-lias enzyme, a multi-protein complex responsible for the release of methane and ethylene from methylphosphonate and 2-hydroxyethylphosphonate and the mechanism that allows bacteria to obtain phosphate from these compounds. Our field and laboratory experiments confirmed that methylphosphonate and 2-hydroxyethylphosphonate were equally abundant and biobailable in DOM. This result was important because methane and ethylene supersaturation levels were also similar in phosphate-depleted waters, indicating there is a close connection between phosphonates and the production of these gases. Together our results indicate that bacterial degradation of DOM phosphonates is a significant source of methane and ethylene in the Sargasso Sea. Because phosphonate synthesis and degradation pathways are ubiquitous in marine systems, our findings also suggest that ocean regions prone to phosphate limitation can be a significant source of atmospheric methane and ethylene.