Seminar Speaker Focuses on Nighttime Feeding Strategy of Zooplankton

Is raiding the cupboard at night a survival-of-the-fittest strategy for tiny sea creatures called zooplankton? That question will be addressed by visiting scientist James Pierson in a seminar of Old Dominion University's Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography (CCPO) today at 3:30 p.m.

The seminar, and a reception with refreshments beginning at 3 p.m., are free and open to the public. The CCPO is on the third floor of Innovation Research Building 1 in University Village.

Pierson is a post doctoral researcher at the Horn Point Laboratory of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science. He works with a group that has developed zooplankton traps to test the hypothesis that the little creatures make repeated nighttime feeding forays to the food-rich sea surface from the food-poor layer of water just below the surface.

The researchers found that some zooplankton, indeed, do make the forays and that the behavior may confer a significant fitness advantage, in part because zooplankton have less chance of being eaten themselves when they spend most of their time below the surface.