Sack Lunch Seminar (SLS)

How Zooplankton Feed: Mechanisms, Traits and Tradeoffs





In order to grow and survive, zooplankton in the ocean daily have to clear a volume of ambient water for prey particles that is equivalent to about 106 times their own body volume, irrespective of their size. Despite the enormous size range and diversity of zooplankton there is a limited number of solutions to the problem of concentrating dilute prey from a sticky medium. In the seminar I will describe the principal food collection mechanisms, discuss their fluid mechanical constraints, and show how their efficiencies are inherently different. The optimality of feeding strategies, evaluated as the ratio of gain over risk, varies with the environment, and may explain differences in distributions of various feeding types as well as other aspects of the biology of zooplankton (mating behavior, predator defense strategies) and their phytoplankton prey (seasonal distribution).