zooplankton – 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.

“to see sandeel the way kittiwakes do”

Kittiwakes and many other UK seabirds have declined rapidly over several decades, alongside declines in the energy available in the ocean food chain that supports them. Agnes Olin’s PhD project (2018-2020) focused on sandeels as a link in this chain, looking upward to their spatial association with trends in kittiwake numbers, and downward to changes … Read more

I’m trying to write a book about plankton and fish

My first science zine. Covid-19 lockdown project, month 3. In retrospect I think it’s let down by the lettering, especially because I missed the opportunity to distinguish the two voices in it (it’s a collab with a then-4-year-old). But in true Prof. Dr. Style I’m leaving it on my website anyway. It’s folded from one … 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…

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.

Invasive green crab in Willapa Bay (2009)

Banas NS, MacDonald PS, Armstrong DA (2009) Green crab larval retention in Willapa Bay, Washington: An intensive Lagrangian modeling approach.

+ More