Zooplankton metabolic activity (respiration and ETS) from three stages of the Malaspina 2010 campaign

Abstract

During the MALASPINA 2010 campaign three ocean transects were sampled for ETS activity and respiration, two from the Indian Ocean and one from the Atlantic Ocean. Zooplankton samples are captured from the upper 150 m with a WP2 100μm mesh net. Respiration (R), biomass and potential respiration (Φ) were measured on three size fractions of mixed populations of crustaceans from these samples. In addition, experiments of the effect of starvation on R and Φ were conducted on mixed crustaceans. In the Great Australian Bight the protein‐specific R and Φ were 1.58 ± 0.81 and 1.98 ± 0.68 μmol O2 · h‐1 ·mg‐1, in the southern Indian Ocean they were 1.49 ± 0.62 and 1.60 ± 0.62 μmol O2 · h‐1 ·mg‐1, and during the Atlantic crossing they were 1.24 ± 0.82 and 1.06 ± 0.64 μmol O2 · h‐1 ·mg‐1. Challenging Kleiber’s law, we found that the Kleiber exponent, b, for the southern Indian Ocean zooplankton was 0.70, approaching Rubner’s surface law with a b of 0.66, but the values of b for the Great Australian Bight were 0.93 and for the Atlantic crossing, 1.03, closer to the isometric theory of Glazier (2005). Starvation results showed that there was no significant difference (p>0.05) in either R/Φ or log R / log biomass after 24 hours of starvation