Project: Causes and consequences of hypoxia and pH impacts on zooplankton: Linking movement behavior to vertical distribution.

NSF Award Abstract:
Low oxygen (hypoxia) and low pH are known to have profound physiological effects on zooplankton, the microscopic animals of the sea. It is likely that many individual zooplankton change vertical mirgration behaviors to reduce or avoid these stresses. However, avoidance responses and their consequences for zooplankton distributions, and for interactions of zooplankton with their predators and prey, are poorly understood. This study will provide information on small-scale behavioral responses of zooplankton to oxygen and pH using video systems deployed in the field in a seasonally hypoxic estuary. The results will deepen our understanding of how zooplankton respond to low oxygen and pH conditions in ways that could profoundly affect marine ecosystems and fisheries through changes in their populations and distributions. This project will train graduate students and will engage K-12 students and teachers in under-served coastal communities by developing ocean technology-based citizen-scientist activities and curricular materials in plankton ecology, ocean change, construction and use of biological sensors, and quantitative analysis of environmental data.

Individual directional motility is a primary mechanism underlying spatio-temporal patterns in zooplankton population distributions. Motility is used by most zooplankton species to select among water column positions that differ in biotic and abiotic variables such as prey, predators, light, oxygen concentration, and pH. Species-specific movement responses to de-oxygenation and acidification are likely mechanisms through which short-term, localized impacts of these stressful conditions on individual zooplankton will be magnified or suppressed as they propagate up to population, community, and ecosystem-level dynamics. This study will quantify responses by key zooplankton species to oxygen and pH using in situ video systems to measure changes in individual behavior in hypoxic, low- pH versus well-oxygenated, high-pH regions of a seasonally hypoxic estuary. Distributions and movements of zooplankton will be quantified using three approaches: 1) an imaging system deployed in situ on a profiling mooring over two summers in a hypoxic region, 2) imagers deployed on Lagrangian drifters to sample simultaneously throughout the water column, and 3) vertically-stratified pumps and net tows to verify species identification and video-based abundance estimates. These field observations will be combined with laboratory analysis of zooplankton movements in oxygen and pH gradients, and with spatially-explicit models to predict how behavioral mechanisms lead to large-scale impacts of environmental stresses.

The following deployments were conducted in 2017 and 2018:
CB1077: https://www.bco-dmo.org/deployment/735746
CB1072: https://www.bco-dmo.org/deployment/735748
Zoocam_ORCA_Twanoh_2017: https://www.bco-dmo.org/deployment/735762
RC0008: https://www.bco-dmo.org/deployment/775288
Mooring ORCA_Hoodsport; NANOOS-APL4: https://www.bco-dmo.org/deployment/775291