| Summary: | Memòria de tesi doctoral presentada per Sara Zamora Terol per optar al grau de Doctora en Ciències del Mar del Departament d'Enginyeria Hidràulica, Marítima i Ambiental (EHMA) de la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), realitzada sota la direcció del del Dr. Enric Saiz Sendró de l'Institut de Ciències del Mar (ICM-CSIC).-- 265 pages Copepods are probably the most abundant metazoan on earth (Humes 1994), successfully distributed throughout oceans, nearshore habitats, and freshwater systems (Boxshall and Halsey 2004). Within zooplankton, copepods have an important role in the biogeochemical cycles recycling nutrients in the oceans, and are key organisms in trophic pelagic webs as link with higher trophic levels. Although copepods have been deeply studied since the old days, our knowledge of their biology and ecology is still fragmentary. During years the methods used to collect zooplankton have caused a bias on our knowledge on the structure and functioning of plankton communities, neglecting the importance of their smallest fraction, including the small-sized species of copepods (Gallienne and Robins 2001; Calbet et al. 2001). Although in the early XX century the potential relevance of small copepods such as Oithona was already envisaged (Bigellow 1926), historically most of the research on copepods has been focused on the largest species. The difficult handling of small organisms, and the idea that larger copepods were more relevant in marine pelagic communities, probably contributed to the scarce interest devoted to the study of small copepods. The research focused on the smallest zooplankton has received a considerable impulse in the last decades, but still many aspects of the biology and ecology of small copepods are poorly known. In this introduction I will briefly explain how, when and where the interest on plankton research started; and some basic aspects of zooplankton and marine copepods will be described. I will finish it by explaining some characteristics of the ecology and biology of the genus Oithona, and the reasons why this small-sized copepod has an important ecological role in marine plankton communities, and justify its scientific interest Funding for the research carried out in this thesis was obtained from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (current Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness) through my Ph.D. fellowship (BES-2008-004231) and the research projects CTM2007-60052 and CTM2011-23480 to Enric Saiz. The investigations conducted during this thesis were also funded by, the Greenland Climate Research Centre, through the project 6505 to Torkel Gissel Nielsen, and the European Commission FP7 EURO-BASIN (grant agreement: 264 933). Other institutions that have made the research of this thesis possible are the Arktisk Station in Qeqertarsuaq, and the Australian Institute of Marine Science Peer Reviewed
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