| Summary: | International audience A large majority of in situ imaging systems produce black and white images. From human eyes or image descriptors, we find that grey levels differences often represent a large source of variations within these dataset. For living organisms, these variations could bring insights on plankton ecology because there are signatures of pigmented structures (gut content, gonads and eggs) and camouflage strategies (transparency, pigmentation). This brings us to an important interest of behaviour and functional ecology : animal color. In this work, we will discuss variations of copepod color, firstly inferred from underwater images of arctic copepods of the Calanus genus. Then, from a small meta-analysis based on ~180 carotenoid quantifications from marine and freshwater ecosystems, we will try to understand how copepod color varies at a global scale and show how carotenoid pigmentation influences their fitness (survival, growth, and reproduction). Finally, we will attempt to bring perspectives about color in plankton imagery and the potentials it could have to monitor the sustainability of key pelagic ecosystems such as arctic and subarctic waters.
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