Professor Andrew Hirst, University of Liverpool - Death of a Zooplankton (Quantifying Mortality Rates in the Ocean)

4:00pm - 5:00pm / Monday 11th December 2017 / Venue: Jane Herdman Building
Type: Seminar / Category: Department
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Mortality is one of the least well known demographic rates in the plankton. Yet while this term has been sparsely quantified in the pelagic environment, and the causes of death are poorly understood, mortality of zooplankton is critical to population dynamics, productivity and ocean biogeochemistry. In this study we use an inverse solution to attempt to quantify global patterns of mortality rates in pelagic copepods (the dominant zooplankton), and address some key unresolved questions: Does mortality vary with temperature? Do small species have greater mortality rates than large? And do zooplankton die of old age?