Table of Contents

• Coverage
• Dataset Description
  • Methods & Sampling
  • Data Processing Description
• Data Files
• Related Publications
• Related Datasets
• Parameters
• Instruments
• Deployments
• Project Information
• Funding

Five combined bottle incubation and seawater dilution experiments were performed over a two-week period where the in-situ 2-35 µm total cell biomass ranged from 37 – 158 µg C L-1. Both Parvocalanus crassirostris and Bestiolina similis grazed a range of prey types and sizes, and shifted their selectivity of prey groups over the two-week period. In general, P. crassirostris grazed on a wider spectrum of prey than B. similis, which avoided the smallest potential prey (2-5 µm) across all dates. Both species had similar overall grazing rates as well as high daily carbon rations (at times >100%), and selected for the largest cells when they were more abundant. The trophic impact of each species was driven largely by in situ nauplius abundance, which was higher for P. crassirostris, from 0.8 to 8.9 nauplii L-1, than for B. similis, which ranged from 0.2 to 0.8 nauplii L-1.  Our results suggest that the two species overlap in their potential prey, however, P. crassirostris appears to target a wider variety of prey, with B. similis preferring larger cells. 

BCO-DMO Processing:

- added conventional header with dataset name, PI name, version date, reference information
- renamed parameters to BCO-DMO standard
- reformatted date from d-Mon-yy to yyyy-mm-dd
- transformed table rows and columns
- added lat/lon columns

Description from NSF Award Abstract:
The most abundant metazoans in the open sea are often the earliest developmental stages of copepods, their nauplii. Nauplii remain under-studied due to the limitations of conventional techniques and an historical emphasis on studying the larger mesozooplankton. However, there is increasing recognition that nauplii play important roles in food web dynamics, and considerable evidence that nauplii may be important trophic intermediaries between microbial and classical food webs due to their high abundance, high weight-specific ingestion rates, and ability to feed on relatively small particles. This team of investigators is developing a novel molecular approach to studying diverse populations of nauplii in mixed field samples based on quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction (qPCR). They propose to complete development and validation of this qPCR-based technique for enumeration of nauplii, and evaluate its utility in the field. The specific objectives of this research are to identify and reduce technical and biological sources of error in the methodology, determine the accuracy of the method across a range of environmental conditions, and complete one paired field experiment that compares the grazing impact of naupliar and protozoan micro-grazers in a model subtropical coastal ecosystem.

Note: This project is funded by an NSF EAGER award.

Related publications:
Jungbluth, M.J., Goetze, E., and Lenz, P.H. 2013. Measuring copepod naupliar abundance in a subtropical bay using quantitative PCR. Marine Biology, 160: 3125-3141. doi: 10.1007/s00227-013-2300-y

Jungbluth, M.J., and Lenz, P.H. 2013. Copepod diversity in a subtropical bay based on a fragment of the mitochondrial COI gene. Journal of Plankton Research, 35(3): 630-643. doi: 10.1093/plankt/fbt015