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Zooplankton!

2 Types of Zooplankton: -Holoplankton: entire life as plankton, spend most of their life in open ocean (copepods, krill, cnidarians, radiolarians, etc.) -Meroplankton: only a portion of their life is spent as plankton, usually remain in shallow coastal waters (crabs, lobsters, fish, etc.) -Zooplankton diversity increases with salinity -Zooplankton biomass is not equivalent to phytoplankton biomass

Zooplankton consume many sizes of phytoplankton, often eat detritus, a lot of phytoplankton biomass sinks

Zooplankton have a delay in maturation (and cannot immediately utilize phytoplankton availability)

Meroplankton!: -Consists of juvenile and larval stages of nektonic and benthic organisms -Selective Tidal Stream Transport (STTT): meroplankton cannot swim against the current, therefore use the tides to go where they need to -Advantages: occupy new habitats (that the adults cannot), Gene exchange, reduction in intraspecies competition, new food sources, reduction in predation

Nekton!: -Consists of fish and swimming invertebrates (invertebrates mostly swimming crabs, shrimp, krill) -Adapted to withstand a large range of environmental conditions -Estuaries contain 50-100 different fish species -30%-60% of shelf species use estuaries at some point during their lifespan -Many consume detritus -Production of nekton correlated with volume of river runoff and type of area (i.e., salt marsh, mangrove, etc.) -Residents: spend entire life in estuary, 8%-30% of nekton species -Transients: spend a portion of life in estuary

Saltwater Spawners: spawn outside estuary, larvae/juveniles move into estuaries as a nursery, adults use estuary for feeding/growth

Estuarine Spawners: spawn in estuaries, then juveniles spend first year in estuaries (flounder)

Anadromous: migrate from saltwater to freshwater to spawn (salmon, alewife)

Catadromous: migrate from freshwater to saltwater to spawn (american and european eels)

Holoplankton-Copepods: -Most numerous zooplankton, can micro or macroscopic -Hard exoskeleton, segmented, joints, shrimp-like body form -Can be herbivores, carnivores, or parasites (herbivores mainly eat diatoms) -Consume half of their body weight each day! -Critical organisms for transferring productivity!