I use numerical and analytical techniques to study the dynamics of various models of plankton food webs with and without resource fluctuations. Plankton are ideal organisms because they are very small, fast-reproducing organisms so they can easily be used in laboratory experiments to verify any results. We can study simple food webs to develop a better understanding of more complex food webs. T...

Long-term changes in the seasonal timing of phytoplankton and zooplankton population development (i.e. phenological changes) have been widely reported in freshwater and marine ecosystems, and have been interpreted as a biological response to ongoing climate change. Observed among-species variations in the rates and patterns of these changes have led to concerns that seasonal trophic interaction...

During the 1980s, the North Sea plankton community underwent a well-documented ecosystem regime shift, including both spatial changes (northward species range shifts) and temporal changes (increases in the total abundances of warmer water species). This regime shift has been attributed to climate change. Plankton provide a link between climate and higher trophic-level organisms, which can forag...

Plankton is an important food item of fishes and indicator for the productivity of a water body. The present study was conducted to evaluate the effects of bottom soil textural conditions on abundance of plankton in aquaculture pond. The experiment was carried out using three treatments, i.e., ponds bottom with sandy loam (T1), with loam (T2) and with clay loam (T3). The ranges of water quality...

A long-standing problem in plankton ecology is sparseness of taxa-specific data. New optical imaging systems are becoming available which can acquire high-resolution data on the abundance and biomass of plankton taxa. The Video Plankton Recorder (VPR) has been designed and used for automatic sampling and visualization of major planktonic taxa at sea in real time, providing high-resolution data ...

Plankton play an important role in the ecology of the ocean and the climate because of their participation in the global carbon cycle at the base of the food chain. However, damaging plankton blooms can sometimes occur and are initially characterized by sudden transient increases in the phytoplankton population. They are thought to be driven by several effects, such as seasonal variations in te...

It has been hypothesized that changes in the marine biological pump caused a major portion of the glacial reduction of atmospheric carbon dioxide by 80 to 100 parts per million through increased iron fertilization of marine plankton, increased ocean nutrient content or utilization, or shifts in dominant plankton types. We analyze sedimentary records of marine productivity at the peak and the mi...

Much interest has recently been devoted to reconstructing the dynamic structure of ecological systems on the basis of time-series data. Using 10 years of monthly data on phyto- and zooplankton abundance from the Bay of Biscay (coastal to shelf-break sites), we demonstrate that the interaction between these two plankton components is approximately linear, whereas the effects of environmental fac...

In atoll lagoons of French Polynesia, growth and reproduction of pearl oysters are mainly driven by plankton concentration. However, the actual diet of black-lip pearl oysters Pinctada margaritifera in these lagoons is poorly known. To fill this gap, we used the flow through chamber method to measure clearance rates of P. margaritifera in Ahe atoll lagoon (Tuamotu Archipelago, French Polynesia)...

European eels (Anguilla anguilla) undertake spawning migrations of more than 5000 km from continental Europe and North Africa to frontal zones in the Sargasso Sea. Subsequently, the larval offspring are advected by large-scale eastward ocean currents towards continental waters. However, the Sargasso Sea is oligotrophic, with generally low plankton biomass, and the feeding biology of eel larvae ...