Lead institution:
Akvaplan-niva – Norway
Vertical migration of zooplankton is known as the greatest synchronized animal movement of our planet. In the coastal and offshore waters of northern Norway, a tiny herbivorous copepod named Calanus finmarchicus performs two different vertical migrations.
These include daily vertical movements of tens-to-hundreds of meters (diel vertical migration) and seasonal movements of hundreds-to-thousands of meters (seasonal vertical migration) in response to corresponding variations of irradiance, temperature, food availability and visual predation risk. These migrations play a paramount ecological and economic role because vertical behaviour, abundance and phenology of many commercially harvested fish species are linked to these and vertical migrations contribute to the export of atmospheric carbon into the ocean’s deep interior – a key process in the buffering of climate change. However, due to rapid rate of climate change, routine diel and seasonal environmental variability under which these migrations occur keep shifting unprecedentedly, and little is known about how vertical migrations of C. finmarchicus would respond to these environmental shifts. While the current understanding of the subject matter focuses on the impacts of individual environmental variables on vertical migrations, the proposed project, Migratory Crossroads, investigates the cumulative effects of irradiance, temperature, food availability, and predation shifts in future high-latitude marine habitats on C. finmarchicus diel and seasonal vertical migrations. This hybrid mechanistic-empirical approach integrates predictions from a simulation model with unrestricted representations of vertical migrations, validated using state-of-the-art high-resolution field data. Through Migratory Crossroads, the aim is to accurately forecast future dynamics of C. finmarchicus vertical migrations and their implications for ecological and economic benefits derived from these migrations.
Start Date: 01/01/2024
End Date: 31/12/2026
Lead Contact: Dumindu Kanchana Bandara Wijekoon Mudiyanselage (kba@akvaplan.niva.no)