Krill in the Arctic and the Atlantic - climatic variability and adaptive capacity
Krill are key species in marine food-webs and are distributed in all oceans with 86 species worldwide. They occupy a central role as consumers and as secondary producers forming an important food source for higher trophic levels from fish, squid and sea birds to marine mammals such as seals and whal...
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| Format: | Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Alfred-Wegener-Institut für Polar- und Meeresforschung
2015
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| Online Access: | https://www.openagrar.de/receive/openagrar_mods_00024988 https://www.openagrar.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/openagrar_derivate_00001762/dn058233.pdf http://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.45860 |
| Summary: | Krill are key species in marine food-webs and are distributed in all oceans with 86 species worldwide. They occupy a central role as consumers and as secondary producers forming an important food source for higher trophic levels from fish, squid and sea birds to marine mammals such as seals and whales. A change in regional krill populations would thus have a dramatic impact on the ecosystems of many climate zones. - However, scientific knowledge on the ecophysiology of krill is scarce. The state of science is rather patchy (mainly focused on the charismatic Antarctic krill Euphausia superba) and there is no or little data available for an understanding of these key species’ ecology with a view to predict ecosystem changes in the oceans. - The present PhD thesis aimed to contribute a broad range of ecophysiological data of abundant and ecologically important krill species from the Atlantic and the Arctic to assess these species’ metabolic performance and elucidate their overall adaptation to their respective environments under the constraints of ecosystem variability. . |
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