Journal
ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION
Volume 8, Issue 22, Pages 10868-10878Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/ece3.4546
Keywords
biogenic fluxes; biological pump; carbon sink; climate change; copepods; fisheries; global ecosystem models; trophic ecology; zooplankton
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Funding
- La Trobe University
- Fundacion Pedro Barrie de la Maza [3003197/2013]
- Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion [CTM2007-66408-C02, CTM2011-25929, CTM2015-69519-R]
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Global ecosystem models are essential tools for predicting climate change impacts on marine systems. Modeled biogenic carbon fluxes in the ocean often match measured data poorly and part of this could be because small copepods (<2 mm) are modeled as unicellular feeders grazing on phytoplankton and microzooplankton. The most abundant copepods from a seasonal upwelling region of the Eastern North Atlantic were sorted, and a molecular method was applied to copepod gut contents to evaluate the extent of metazoan predation under two oceanographic conditions, a trophic pathway not accounted for in global models. Scaling up the results obtained herein, based on published field and laboratory estimates, suggests that small copepods could ingest 1.79-27.20 gigatons C/year globally. This ignored metazoan-copepod link could increase current estimates of biogeochemical fluxes (remineralization, respiration, and the biological pump) and export to higher trophic levels by 15.6%-24.4%. It could also account for global discrepancies between measured daily ingestion and copepod metabolic demand/growth. The inclusion of metazoan predation into global models could provide a more realistic role of the copepods in the ocean and if these preliminary data hold true at larger sample sizes and scales, the implications would be substantial at the global scale.
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