In plankton ecology, biological and physical dynamics are coupled, structuring how plankton interact with their environment and other organisms. This interdisciplinary field has progressed considerably over the recent past, due in large part to advances in technology that have improved our ability to observe plankton and their fluid environment simultaneously across multiple scales. Recent rese...

Ecological succession provides a widely accepted description of seasonal changes in phytoplankton and mesozooplankton assemblages in the natural environment, but concurrent changes in smaller (i.e. microbes) and larger (i.e. macroplankton) organisms are not included in the model because plankton ranging from bacteria to jellies are seldom sampled and analyzed simultaneously. Here we studied, fo...

Andrew D. Barton,* Andrew J. Pershing, Elena Litchman, Nicholas R. Record, Kyle F. Edwards, Zoe V. Finkel, Thomas Kiørboe, and Ben A. Ward Abstract Changes in marine plankton communities driven by environmental variability impact the marine food web and global biogeochemical cycles of carbon and other elements. To predict and assess these community shifts and their consequences, ecologists are ...

Plankton communities play a key role in the marine food web and are expected to be highly sensitive to ongoing environmental change. Oceanic uptake of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) causes pronounced shifts in marine carbonate chemistry and a decrease in seawater pH. These changes-summarized by the term ocean acidification (OA)-can significantly affect the physiology of planktonic organisms...

When Victor Hensen deployed the first true plankton net in 1887, he and his colleagues were attempting to answer three fundamental questions: What planktonic organisms are present in the ocean? How many of each type are present? How does the plankton’s composition change over time? Although answering these questions has remained a central goal of oceanographers, the sophisticated tools availabl...

I wish to establish whether the plankton is affected by Langmuir circulations (LCs). LCs are wind and wave induced flows in the mixed layer (ML) and comprised of counterrotating, helical cells aligned with the wind. They occur broadly and frequently. While their surface manifestation is relatively well known, their dynamics and relation to the plankton are less well understood. Of particular in...

aquatic plants have a major influence upon other aquatic organisms, by altering both water chemistry and spatial structure of the habitat in shallow water bodies. some of them, such as stratiotes aloides l., may suppress algal growth. but how aquatic plants would ultimately influence the heterotrophic community and the aquatic ecosystem as a whole is far from clear. our microcosm-based study de...

Stomach contents of Simulium perflavum Roubaud larvae were analyzed and compared with plankton and periphyton collected in five streams, in Central Amazonia (Manaus and Presidente Figueiredo counties), in Sep./Oct.1996 (dry season) and Feb./Mar. 1997 (rainy season). A total of 1,400 last-instar larvae were dissected; the stomach contents were analyzed using different methods: fresh and after ox...

Eutrophication, often resulting from human activity, is a serious threat to aquatic communities. Theoretical analysis of this phenomenon, based on conceptual mathematical models, leads to controversial predictions known as Rosenzweig's paradox of enrichment. At the same time, field observations demonstrate that real plankton communities exhibit various mechanisms of self-regulation which can bu...

Pearl culture industry represents one of the dominant business sector of French Polynesia. However, it still entirely relies on unpredictable spat collection success. Our aim was to assess the influence of natural plankton concentration fluctuations on maturation and spawning of the black lip pearl oyster Pinctada margaritifera, during a 4 months survey conducted in Ahe atoll lagoon. Plankton c...