Zooplankton Census Provides
They have one bright red eye, travel in swarms, propel their armored bodies through ocean currents with the speed of a jaguar and originate from the time of the dinosaurs.
If they weren’t smaller than a millimeter, copepods and other zooplankton might be considered fearsome aquatic predators, but instead they serve as both the low end of the food chain and a vital warning system for global climate change.
From her office at UConn’s Avery Point campus, Ann Bucklin, Ph.D., marine sciences department head in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is leading the international decade-long Census of Marine Zooplankton (CMarZ) project, which will create a census of the estimated 14,000 zooplankton species. The project is part of the larger Census of Marine Life, funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and dozens of other private and public funders globally. The Sloan Foundation support of Bucklin’s work is managed by UConn’s Office for Sponsored Programs.
Bucklin credits private support for being the “anchor” of the project, allowing the researchers to conduct exploration that simply wouldn’t be allowed by public funding, and then giving the team leverage to apply for additional support elsewhere. The CMarZ team has already raised nearly fifty times the amount of the Sloan grant through private and public organizations around the world.
Given the pressing nature of climate change research, Bucklin believes the work can’t be done fast enough.
“Zooplankton are a global early-warning system that ricochet through ocean food webs and chemical cycles. A small change in ocean temperature can have dramatic effects on them. As the ocean’s pH increases, zooplankton shells dissolve,” she says. “We need to establish benchmarks for what zooplankton are in the oceans now, so we can understand and detect changes when ecosystems go awry. These studies need global teams of researchers, which are usually difficult to fund, but the Sloan Foundation takes a visionary approach that supports our lofty goals.”
The support is especially important, Bucklin says, because public funding for exploratory science is extremely limited. However, that is precisely the kind of work that her team needs to find and classify these tiny creatures in the ocean, which presents a massive, changing and difficult environment for scientists. In the spring of 2006, the CMarZ team took an exploratory cruise of the North Atlantic, casting their finely meshed nets four miles below the surface to capture and then bar code the DNA of more than 2,500 zooplankton species found in the region. Additional cruises of the South Atlantic and Pacific are planned for the next several years by her colleagues in Germany and Japan. Bucklin says the experience of pulling the team together to meet firsthand and conduct their field work is vital to their ultimate success.
“The Sloan funding is like a gift to do what most of us have wanted to do throughout our careers,” she says. “What’s out there? Why is it there? These are the things that drive you to be a scientist.”
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