Plankton – Neil Banas

Bowhead whales and plankton teleconnections

Disko Bay, West Greenland is at the end of oceanic “rivers” of Calanus copepods (red/orange lines below) that enter the bay in winter, still in diapause. They form a really dense, deep layer, and bowhead whales come from a wide area (purple) to eat them. So how much of the Calanus standing stock do the … Read more

origamiplankton.org!

origamiplankton.org for copepod diagrams, exhibition photos, and really big krill.

Early warning for Pseudo-nitzschia HABs on Pacific Northwest beaches: From plankton ecology to operational decision support

Certain species of the phytoplankton Pseudo-nitzschia (PN) produce a potent neurotoxin, domoic acid (DA), that bioaccumulates in shellfish, and can cause severe illness and death in humans. Past outbreaks have caused fisheries closures and millions of dollars of losses to crab and clam harvesters, and contributed to the death of many species of marine mammals. … Read more

Coltrane (Copepod Life-history Traits and Adaptation to Novel Environments)

The Coltrane (Copepod Life history Traits and Adaptation to New Environments) model is a mathematical framework for layering multiple levels of mesozooplankton biology on top of oceanographic models. It resolves 1) individual life history (strategy traits controlling growth, development, and size, diagnosed from a broad review of lab studies); 2) population dynamics (the time-dependent energy … Read more

The Bering Sea in spring, 1971-2050

The Eastern Bering Sea hosts extremely rich pelagic and benthic fisheries, and also experiences strong interannual variation in both fisheries recruitment and the underlying physics and plankton biology. This paper…

Why is the Northwest coast so productive?

The Pacific Northwest coast is the most biologically productive region of the California Current upwelling system, despite the fact that the upwelling winds are much stronger farther south. How can this be?

Modeling Cascadia

The Cascadia model from the Univ of Washington Coastal Modeling Group is a realistic 3D model, implemented in ROMS, of the North American Pacific Northwest coast from mid-Oregon to mid-Vancouver Island, including the inland waters of the Salish Sea. It was developed as part of the NSF/NOAA PNWTOX (Pacific Northwest Toxins) project, based on previous … Read more

FISH 330: Climate Impacts on Marine Ecosystems (2013)

Course announcement: This course links the physics of climate to marine ecosystem processes, exploring both observed climate impacts from the past and projected impacts of human-caused climate change in the future. Case studies include a spectrum of organisms from plankton to whales, in polar, sub-arctic, temperate, tropical, and upwelling ecosystems. We will also discuss the … Read more

Adding fine-scale trophic complexity to a plankton model

Natural plankton communities are far more diverse than even a very complicated numerical model can account for. The ASTroCAT model (Allometric/Stochastic Trophic Complexity Analysis Tool) is an experiment in systematically resolving the complexity in phytoplankton–microzooplankton trophic interactions, and exploring the effects of this complexity on ecosystem structure, function, and predictability. This paper… Banas NS (2011) … Read more

Visualizing nutrient-phytoplankton-zooplankton dynamics

interactive model here.

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