Climate change is expected to affect resource-consumer interactions underlying stability in polar food webs. Polar benthic organisms have adapted to the marked seasonality characterising their habitats by concentrating foraging and reproductive activity in summer months, when inputs from sympagic and pelagic producers increase. While this enables the persistence of biodiverse food webs, the mec...

Seasonal variations of the seawater properties (e.g. temperature, salinity, density and chlorophyll-a) in western part of the southern coastal waters of the Caspian Sea near the Iranian coast were studied. A portable CTD probe was applied for profiling from sea surface to bottom at 23 stations. Maximum depth of the profiling stations was more than 470 m in the study area. Vertical structure of ...

Attrill et al. (2007) in their paper ‘‘Climate-related increases in jellyfish frequency suggest a more gelatinous future for the North Sea’’ present data showing the occurrence of nematocysts in continuous plankton recorder (CPR) samples collected over more than 40 yr. They suggest that, contrary to previous work examining a shorter period (Lynam et al. 2004), cnidarian nematocysts ‘‘most likel...

A specially designed circular towing tan~ was developed at the Northeast Fisheries Center (NEFC) for calibrating plankton-net flowmeters . ashore in order to provide more accurate volume estimates and to save valuable shipboard time. Results of a cross-calibration experiment with a flume in use at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) demonstrated that calibration factors produced by ...

Assessing the ecological status of plankton in Anjos Bay: a flow cytometry approach G. C. Pereira, A. R. de Figuiredo, P. M. Jabor, and N. F. F. Ebecken Federal University of Rio de Janeiro – COPPE/UFRJ, Centro de Tecnologia, Cidade Universitária, Ilha do Fundão, Bloco B, Cx. Postal 68506 Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil Admiral Paulo Moreira Institute of Sea Studies – IEAPM, Departamento de Oceanogr...

A long-term time series of plankton records collected by the continuous plankton recorder (CPR) Survey in the northeast Atlantic indicates an increased occurrence of Cnidaria since 2002. In the years 2007 and 2008, outbreaks of the warm-temperate scyphomedusa, Pelagia noctiluca, appeared in CPR samples between 45° N to 58° N and 1° W to 26° W. Knowing the biology of this species and its occurre...