What is it about?
This paper unravels the zooplankton communities that are found in the coastal upwelling area off the Ría de Vigo (NW Iberian Peninsula). Using multidimensional techniques up to six different communities were found in the Ria de Vigo following a coastal-oceanic gradient: three in July - called coastal, frontal and oceanic- and another three in autumn. A detailed description of each community and their relationships with the environmental variables is provided.
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Why is it important?
Our findings reveal that the Ría de Vigo is not an homogeneous but heterogeneous environment where the zooplankton is not randomly distributed. These organisms selectively choose the water masses (and the community) that better suits their needs. These movements between communities are essentially carried out by modifying their vertical distribution.
Perspectives
Though it was really hard i really enjoyed to find how the zooplankton organisms that i identified for more than one year and a half (around 70.000 individuals), emerged from the data cloud constituting different communities. This was a great example of an emerging property, where the individual points of the data cloud when analysed together allowed to see a higher level of organisation that was the result of the interconnections of those points. Even more exciting was to find that these "superorganisms" (communities) changed spatially and temporally coupled with the oceanography of the area, showing us that nature behaves in a complex way even at lower organisation levels.
Dr Alvaro Roura
La Trobe University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Short-term meso-scale variability of mesozooplankton communities in a coastal upwelling system (NW Spain), Progress In Oceanography, February 2013, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.pocean.2012.09.003.
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