Zooplankton Ecology Lab

Undersea canyons play disproportionately important roles as oceanic biological hotspots and are critical for our understanding of many coastal ecosystems. Canyon-associated biological hotspots have persisted for thousands of years along the Western Antarctic Peninsula, despite significant climate variability. Our earlier observations of currents over Palmer Deep canyon, a representative hotspot along the Western Antarctic Peninsula, indicate that surface phytoplankton blooms enter and exit the local hotspot on scales of ~1-2 days (see Project CONVERGE). This time of residence is in conflict with the prevailing idea that canyon associated hotspots are primarily maintained by phytoplankton that are locally grown in association with these features by the upwelling of deep waters rich with nutrients that fuel the phytoplankton growth. Instead, the implication is that horizontal ocean circulation is likely more important to maintaining these biological hotspots than local upwelling through its physical concentrating effects. This multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional project seeks to better resolve the factors that create and maintain focused areas of biological activity at canyons along the Western Antarctic Peninsula and create local foraging areas for marine mammals and birds. The project focus is in the analysis of the ocean transport and concentration mechanisms that sustain these biological hotspots, connecting oceanography to phytoplankton and krill, up through the food web to one of the resident predators, penguins. Revealing the fundamental mechanisms that sustain these known hotspots will significantly advance our understanding of the observed connection between submarine canyons and persistent penguin population hotspots over ecological time, and provide a new model for how Antarctic hotspots function.

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This project is funded by the National Science Foundation, Award # 1745081.