• Some plankton, such as diatoms, grow better at cooler temperatures. Warming may cause other, less palatable, species to replace them, depriving zooplankton and menhaden of their primary food source. • Because phytoplankton are linked to freshwater and nutrient inputs, draught will likely decrease their abundance. Also, when nutrients are reduced, smaller phytoplankton replace diatoms, and the...

Localized concentrations of plankton (i.e. patches) alter the optical and acoustical properties of the water column and can have significant ramifications for the ecological dynamics of marine communities. The goal of this research is to develop a mechanistic understanding and predictive capability of the relative importance of biological versus physical processes in the formation, persistence,...

The long term goal is to increase our understanding of the biological biological, physical biological and chemical biological interactions that control the initiation, maintenance and dissipation of plankton patches. This goal can most readily be achieved by directly measuring processes thought to control plankton patch dynamics, experimentally testing their importance, incorporating those proc...

A two-decade (1989–2008) time series of lake phytoand zooplankton, water characteristics and climate in 17 Danish lakes was analysed to examine the long term changes and the effects of lake restoration efforts. The analyses of the pair-wise correlations across time series revealed a strong synchrony in climatic variables among the lakes. A significant, but weak increase in air temperature was o...

The paddlefish detects electric fields of its planktonic prey. Each plankton particle, such as a moving Daphnia, is an electric dipole. Primary afferent neu-rons of the paddlefish electrosensory system were found to respond transiently to moving dipoles (i.e., Daphnia) within their receptive field. Positive plankton potential increases and negative potential decreases the primary afferent spike...

A coupled biological–physical box model is developed to investigate the seasonal and interannual variability of marine plankton in strongly estuarine systems such as the semi-enclosed estuary of the Strait of Georgia and Juan de Fuca Strait on the west coast of Canada. The estuarine circulation not only supplies nutrients to the euphotic layer but also transports plankton between the straits, c...

Elucidating the relationship between ciliate communities in the benthos and the plankton is critical to understanding ciliate diversity in marine systems. Although data for many lineages are sparse, at least some members of the dominant marine ciliate clades Oligotrichia and Choreotrichia can be found in both plankton and benthos, in the latter either as cysts or active forms. In this study, we...

Plankton size classes of <3 mum consisting largely of unicellular cyanobacteria accounted for 15 to 40% of the total primary production and generally represented <5% of the total phototrophic plankton biovolume in three South Carolina reservoirs.

Planktonic organisms constitute the base of many aquatic food webs. Indeed zooplankton is the key mediator between energy synthesized by phytoplankton and higher trophic levels. Because plankton can vary quickly in term of abundance and biomass according to variations of environmental conditions, it constitutes a significant bio-indicator of global changes like increasing of atmospheric CO 2 , ...