An Assessment of Gelatinous Zooplankton and Impacts on Planktonic Community Structure in Barnegat Bay, New Jersey PDF Download

Author: Christie L. Castellano
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mnemiopsis leidyi
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Author: Alyssa M. Petitdemange
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Zooplankton
Languages : en
Pages :

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Estuaries are biologically diverse and productive marine ecosystems, but many have been degraded as a result of anthropogenic activity, which can also negatively impact sensitive aquatic organisms like zooplankton. Zooplankton represent the crucial link between phytoplankton and higher trophic-level organisms. They are sensitive to environmental variation and increasing water temperature can cause dramatic shifts in zooplankton community structure. Climate change and coastal development favor species that are more tolerant of poor water quality. Barnegat Bay, New Jersey is an eutrophied estuarine lagoon in the Mid-Atlantic Ocean region. A major stress on Barnegat Bay was the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station (OCNGS), which relied on water from the bay for cooling. Power plants entrain organisms in the cooling process and discharge waste heat as thermal pollution, which can negatively impact planktonic community structure. OCNGS operation began in 1969 and closed in September 2018. The objective of this research was to assess the zooplankton community structure of Barnegat Bay in the year prior to and the year following the closure of OCNGS to determine its impacts on coastal zooplankton communities. The results show site-specific increases in the abundance of the scyphozoan C. chesapeakei, the ctenophore M. leidyi, and several zooplankton taxa including calanoid copepods, Brachyura larvae, and Caridea larvae. There was also a significant increase in the abundance of fish eggs along with larval Atlantic Silverside and Bay Anchovy, two important estuarine fish species. Overall, the closure of OCNGS appears to have reduced a significant stress on numerous zooplankton species within the Barnegat Bay estuary, but longerterm studies are necessary to determine whether populations will recover or if permanent community shifts have occurred.

Author: W.M. Jr. Lewis
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461299861
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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This book is based on the premise that the study of ecological communities should be a composite analysis of system properties (community structure, community energetics) and population properties (life history patterns, adaptive strategies) backed by a thorough understanding of the physical chemical environment. Too frequently community ecology takes a much narrower focus. This may partly be the result of perceived antagonisms between schools of thought in ecology. Despite their rather separate origins, the multiple theoretical and methodological tools that now exist must be applied synthetically to real communities if the progress of the past two decades is to continue into the next two. This book has a case history format, which increases the opportunity for detailed analysis, although I have attempted to maintain the general per spective of a community ecologist and to draw extensively from the literature whenever it seems profitable to do so. The case history data are for Lake Lanao, a large tropical lake. The main zooplankton data base used in the analysis is entirely original and unpublished, although the detailed support ing data on the physical-chemical environment and the phytoplankton com munity have been presented in numerous journal articles and are thus abstracted or used selectively to meet the needs of zooplankton community analysis.

Author: Marina Manca
Publisher: MDPI
ISBN: 3039435493
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Zooplankton are of key importance in the structure and functioning of aquatic food webs. They contribute to a large part of the functional and structural biodiversity of predator and prey plankton communities. Promptly responding to long-term and seasonal changes in the physical and chemical environment, they are sensitive indicators of patterns and mechanisms of impact drivers, both natural and human induced. In this volume, we aim to present evidence for both long-term and seasonal changes in zooplankton community structure and dynamics, investigating different approaches from population dynamics to advanced molecular techniques and reconstructing past communities from subfossil remains in lake sediments.

Author: Dmitrii Pantiukhin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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One of the most understudied components of the rapidly changing Arctic ecosystems is the gelatinous zooplankton, comprising cnidarian medusae (Hydrozoa and Scyphozoa), ctenophores, pelagic tunicates, and sometimes also including chaetognaths. Although these organisms play important roles in marine ecosystems, occupying multiple trophic levels, they have been historically neglected due to the difficulties associated with sampling them and the paradigm of them representing a "dead end" in food webs. However, representatives of the different groups were recently shown to serve as a food component for commercially important fish species, act as versatile predators, and contribute significantly to the biological carbon pump. The hypothesis of an ocean "jellification", i.e., a worldwide increase in gelatinous zooplankton biomass, proposed more than a decade ago, is still debated today. For the Arctic Ocean, the questions whether gelatinous zooplankton will increase in abundance, and whether biogeographic shifts in their distributions will take place, have remained largely unanswered. In order to understand the likelihood of such distributional shifts, reliable data are needed on species diversity and abundances and to identify the key physical and biological factors that determine the distribution of gelatinous zooplankton in the Arctic at the local, meso- and pan-Arctic scale. To do so, I leveraged an extensive dataset of historical biological data and analyzed newly collected optical data from recent expeditions to study the diversity, distribution, and abundance of gelatinous zooplankton in several types of ecosystems of the Arctic Ocean. I employed species distribution modeling techniques on both large-scale datasets and regional optical datasets, to evaluate changes in species distributions in space and time, under various climate change scenarios. For addressing these questions on the Pan-Arctic scale, I compiled extensive datasets for gelatinous zooplankton taxa from four public databases: the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the Jellyfish Database Initiative (JeDI), and PANGAEA, spanning six decades and comprising over 24,000 observations. Rigorous data cleaning and taxonomic examination narrowed the focus to eight dominant gelatinous zooplankton taxa with solid identification bases, including two Hydrozoa (Aglantha digitale and Sminthea arctica), two Appendicularia (Oikopleura vanhoeffeni and Fritillaria borealis), two Scyphozoa (Cyanea capillata and Periphylla periphylla), and two Ctenophora (Mertensia ovum, Beroe spp.). Three-dimensional species distribution models were applied to these datasets, revealing a pan-Arctic trend of polar shifts in the distribution of gelatinous zooplankton. The projections indicated for most studied species an expansion of suitable habitat, with the largest one for the scyphozoan Cyanea capillata (180% increase of its niche from 1950-2014 to 2050-2099). The largest niche contraction was found for the hydrozoan Sminthea arctica (15% decrease). I further focused in-depth on different ecosystems that are at the core of the ongoing Atlantification, the open waters of the Fram Strait, the shelf system of the southern Barents Sea, and the western fjords of the Svalbard archipelago. In situ observations of gelatinous zooplankton were collected by conducting depth transects with the Pelagic In situ Observation System (PELAGIOS, for which I annotated over 3200 gelatinous zooplankton observations). For the Fram Strait, I assessed the diversity of the water column from 20 to 2,400m, revealing seasonal migration patterns of gelatinous zooplankton communities, providing major additions to our understanding of the regional bathypelagic diversity. A significant population of Sminthea arctica was observed in the bathypelagic layers of Fram Strait, indicating its important, but so far neglected role, and I recorded the southernmost observation for the hydrozoan species Bathykorus bouilloni. Based on the optical datasets of Fram Strait, I carried out a community distribution modeling approach that was used to model gelatinous zooplankton species abundance and community richness. It was projected that environmental changes in Fram Strait will result in less diverse but more abundant gelatinous zooplankton communities. In terms of species-specific responses, the abundance of the hydrozoan Aglantha digitale is projected to increase by 2% in the water column by 2050, the hydrozoan Sminthea arctica is projected to experience a decline in abundance of up to 60%. The analysis of optical surveys also allowed me to document large aggregations of ctenophore species. In the southwestern part of the Barents Sea, I recorded one of the largest aggregations of adults of Bolinopsis infundibulum. This aggregation was most likely a seasonal phenomenon, supported by a large phytoplankton bloom, and may have extended over several tens of kilometers. Similarly, in a western fjord of Svalbard, Van Mijenfjorden, I found the largest number of individuals ever recorded for the species Beroe sp. and could be linked with oxygen-rich waters. These findings indicate the interplay of physical and biological factors for influencing small-scale distribution patterns of gelatinous zooplankton. A general trend in gelatinous zooplankton community structure was found shared between the results of the in- situ observational studies in Fram Strait and in the Svalbard fjords: Atlantic and transformed Atlantic waters were more abundant in gelatinous zooplankton, whereas the highest taxonomic richness was found in the intermediate and Arctic water masses. These findings hint towards a potential jellification with progressing Atlantification in some Arctic regions. With an overall trend toward niche expansions for most of the arcto-boreal and cosmopolitan species modeled, I anticipate major shifts in the distribution of gelatinous zooplankton in the Arctic regions. These changes are likely to have profound impacts on ecosystem dynamics, affecting fish stocks, biogeochemical cycles and the efficiency of the biological carbon pump.

Author: Isamu Yamazi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Hydrography
Languages : en
Pages : 46

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This study describes the distribution of zooplankton communities in relation to hydrographic conditions in Sandy Hook Bay, New Jersey, as well as the adjoining Navesink and Shrewsbury Rivers during May and June 1962.

Author: Petra. H. Lenz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351403915
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 605

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Zooplankton is a major work of reference for researchers in plankton biology, physiology and behavior, which combines behavioral and psychological approaches to the study of plankton on present and interdisciplinary investigation of sensory processes in pelagic environments. The breadth of perspective thus achieved provides valuable insights into the larger scale ecological processes of biological productivity, community structure and population dynamics. Technological advances in almost all aspects of biological research have opened up opportunities for a re-examination of the sensory ecology of planktonic organisms. In this wide-ranging collection, leading researchers in planktonic behavior and physiology address the rapidly developing interface between these two major areas. The studies presented range from the laboratory to the field and from the cell to the whole organism, but share the common goal of understanding the special sensory world of organisms that live in pelagic environments and how their behavior and physiology relate to it.

Author: Shonali Thangam Chandy
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ctenophora
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Author: Kate M. Dubickas
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : BP Deepwater Horizon Explosion and Oil Spill, 2010
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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In the northeastern Gulf of Mexico, relating changes in zooplankton communities to environmental factors is crucial to understanding the marine ecosystem and impacts of perturbations such as oil spills on marine ecosystems. Zooplankton samples were collected each year between 20052014 in spring and summer in the vicinity of the oil spill (Deepwater Horizon) that occurred in spring 2010. Zooplankton assemblages and environmental conditions significantly differed seasonally, driven by strong variations in zooplankton at continental shelf stations, and by environmental factors including Mississippi River discharge, wind direction, temperature, and chlorophyll concentrations. Total zooplankton abundances were greatest at shelf stations, intermediate at slope stations, and lowest at offshore stations. Seasonal separation was driven by greater abundances of crab zoea, cladocerans, ostracods, and the copepod, Eucalanus spp. during summer. Copepods, Centropages spp., were significant indicators of summer conditions both before and after the oil spill. Sub-regional comparisons in percent composition and abundances of six major non-copepod and seven copepod taxa revealed that most taxa either remained the same or significantly increased in abundance following the spill. A significant decrease in post oil spill taxa was observed only during spring for total copepods, Eucalanaus spp., and for salps at continental slope stations, however varying processing techniques used for zooplankton before and after the spill were employed and should be considered. . Based on our sampling periods, these results indicate that the 2010 oil spill did not significantly impact zooplankton communities in the northeastern Gulf of Mexico.

Author: Barry Volson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Zooplankton
Languages : en
Pages : 576

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