26 September 2002

Marine biology: Seafood diets

Copepods, tiny crustaceans with a long body and a forked tail, feed on diatoms (both shown on cover). But diatoms produce aldehydes that are toxic to copepods in the lab, so do high concentrations of diatoms reduce copepod reproductive success? If this were true in the oceans, current models of plankton population dynamics and determinants of primary productivity would have to be revised. The proof is in the eating, and a new study of 12 ocean regions where diatoms are the dominant phytoplankton reveals no effect on copepod hatching success.

Copepod hatching success in marine ecosystems with high diatom concentrations
XABIER IRIGOIEN, ROGER P. HARRIS, HANS M. VERHEYE, PIERRE JOLY, JEFFREY RUNGE, MICHEL STARR, DAVID POND, ROBERT CAMPBELL, RACHAEL SHREEVE, PETER WARD, AMY N. SMITH, HANS G. DAM, WILLIAM PETERSON, VALENTINA TIRELLI, MARJA KOSKI, TANIA SMITH, DEREK HARBOUR & RUSSELL DAVIDSON
Nature 419, 387–389 (2002); doi:10.1038/nature01055
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