Project: Collaborative Research: Field test of larval behavior on transport and connectivity in an upwelling regime

Description from NSF award abstract:
The majority of larvae of coastal marine species are planktonic and generally weak swimmers. Thus, they are thought to be dispersed widely by coastal currents. However, there is accumulating evidence that their behavior can strongly influence their transport: some remain within estuaries, while others make true migrations between adult and larval habitats, even out to the edge of the continental shelf and back. Rates and directions of larval transport are thought to be determined largely by the timing, duration, and amplitude of vertical migrations and the mean depth that larvae occupy in stratified flows. The PIs propose to provide one of the first direct tests of how behavior affects across-shelf and alongshore transport using biomimetic drifters. The study will be conducted in a region of persistent upwelling, where strong currents are widely believed to overwhelm larval swimming and limit recruitment to adult populations.

Knowledge of underlying mechanisms regulating larval transport is central to understanding ecology and evolution in the sea and anticipating the impacts of climate change on marine populations and communities. The proposed research will provide the first experimental field-test of how larval behavior affects the rates, directions and distances of transport and population connectivity in an upwelling regime. The PIs will test three hypotheses:

1. Residence below the wind-driven surface layer and vertical migrations below that layer keep larvae closer to shore compared to residence in the surface layer or larvae without depth preferences and vertical migration.

2. Residence at depth enhances northward transport near shore, and vertical migration leads to decreased alongshore mean displacement but increased variance for a group.

3. Depth preferences and vertical migrations have pronounced effects on retention and transport of plankton in upwelling regions.

The study will compare direct measurements from mimetic drifters with observed and modeled cross-shelf larval distributions, and with modeled alongshore transport. Results will be broadly applicable to upwelling regimes along the western margins of continents, and the approach can be applied to non-upwelling systems throughout the world.